Speaking Power to Stupid: The Ever-Dumb Green Lantern Comics of Geoff Johns

Picking on superhero comics for being dumb is like punching a baby for not walking well, but there’s something about the inexplicably popular work of Geoff Johns that invites derision. It might be that his influence has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade, culminating in his current position as the Chief Creative Officer at DC Comics, with his style of writing now being the shoddy model for the entire company to follow. This style has its proponents, even among people who should really know better, due to its constant hammering on nostalgia buttons, emphasis on “awesome” moments, and constantly-expanding stakes that reassure readers a long-term plan is in place, no matter how idiotic it is. What’s more, regular injections of gruesome violence and attempts at making everyone a badass make Johns’ comics perfect for those developmentally-stunted members of the audience who want to pretend that the kiddie entertainment of their childhood is all grown up now that it’s full of rape and dismemberment. But look at it with any sort of critical eye, and while occasional moments of dumb action-movie enjoyment might surface, they are buried in an overwhelming self-seriousness that makes the whole enterprise laughable.

So, here’s a look at Johns’ signature franchise, Green Lantern, which he revived in the mid-00s through a convoluted resurrection and redemption of a hero who had been turned into a maniacal mass murderer, then turned into the driving force behind much of DC’s line-wide plotlines, culminating in the “Blackest Night” crossover, the ne plus ultra of Johnsian large-scale death and destruction, a clusterfuck of obnoxious zombies, resurrected characters transformed into badasses, and ridiculous plot points treated with the utmost seriousness. But that comes later; let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Part 1: Back to Basics, But So Much Cooler This Time, Dudes

Johns got to make a clean start with Green Lantern with a new series that started in 2005, having just brought Hal Jordan, the most popular version of the character ever since sometime in the 60s, back to life through a complicated retcon (an abbreviation for the comics fan term “retroactive continuity”, in which writers “fix” previously-written stories by telling what “really” happened) that absolved him of the crimes committed when, in an attempt to shake things up, a 90s storyline had him go crazy, kill off all of the fellow members of his army of space cops, try to destroy the universe, and eventually die saving the Earth. But now he’s back, and it turns out he was actually possessed by some sort of fear entity, and…wow, just trying to explain the basic backstory of this comic is numbness-inducing. It’s bad enough that Johns regularly takes a few pages at the beginning of issues to get readers caught up in the ongoing plot. When even superhero comics readers need regular reminders and recaps to be able to keep up with your stories, you might have tangled them up a bit more than is necessary.

So anyway, as the series begins, Hal Jordan is back to being an Earth-bound superhero, and since one of the core aspects of his characters back in the day was that he flew planes, Johns has him join the Air Force as a fighter pilot. Of course, the Air Force is a branch of the military, but Hal is too cool to have to go through any of the rigamarole of recruitment or orders; no, he simply asks a buddy to have a general let him join up and become a pilot, and even though he was kicked out years ago for punching that same general (another bit of fantasy; strike an officer, you just get a ticket home without any other consequences), they let him back in because, hey, he’s Hal Jordan and he’s awesome.

Why Hal needs to fly planes to get his adrenaline kicks should be the main question here, since he has a ring that lets him create anything imaginable and zoom around the universe at presumably faster-than-light speeds (since he’s always traveling to other star systems) anyway, but it’s mostly the nostalgia factor at work; that’s what he did back in the 60s (when planes were futuristic and glamorous), so that’s what he does now, dammit. Johns also seems to be attempting to ground the character and give him real-world concerns, which mostly serves to make things pretty boring whenever Hal isn’t wearing green. Johns must have realized this, since he ended up pretty much completely dropping any attempts at non-Green Lanterning and focusing solely on space-bound action and intrigue.

Many of the early issues are spent establishing the oh-so-tiresome theme of “overcoming fear”, with characters constantly going on about how everyone is fearful, especially those who don’t want to repopulate Hal’s rebuilt hometown of Coast City (the destruction of which, along with the deaths of its populace, being what drove him into villainy), as if it is more susceptible to chaos than anywhere else in the DC universe. But Hal is the man when it comes to combating fear, as he and his fellow Green Lantern John Stewart exposit to the reader when they explain how they’ve overcome their rings’ former weakness against the color yellow (yes, really): “Feel fear. Overcome it. Not a problem.” Yes, this is serious, insightful treatment of battles between colors.

The rest of the time is spent revitalizing old villains in “edgy” new ways. There’s the Shark, a super-evolved, uh, shark that has arms and legs and communicates telepathically in sentence fragments that all have to do with eating brains. He’s a near-mindless beast, but he also wears what appears to be a wetsuit for some reason, and Johns makes him mean and nasty by giving him a scene out of Jaws by way of Herschell Gordon Lewis:

There’s also Hector Hammond, a gross, giant-headed scientist who Johns attempts to turn into a creepy, telepathic riff on Hannibal Lector, sitting in a prison cell and making cryptic comments to Hal, while commenting that Hal is so cool and he’s Hal’s biggest fan in an apparent attempt to replicate the creepiness of Frank Miller’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight Returns, but without all that icky homoeroticism. He actually provides one of the more morally troubling moments in the series, but not in the intended way; Hal, while trying to get some information out of him, uses his ring to enable the pain centers in his giant brain, and then proceeds to beat him savagely:

Interrogating prisoners by beating information out of them is a pretty common practice in action movies and detective fiction, but that doesn’t make it any less morally troublesome (especially considering the still-continuing debates in U.S. politics about torturing prisoners), and having a guy dressed in green tights bloodying a giant-headed freak just cheapens the whole issue. It should be embarrassing for everyone involved, if only they had any shame.

Hal also faces some Manhunter robots (who have their own long backstory, but it’s not worth going into), which want to exterminate all life or something. There’s a subplot about the government trying to reverse-engineer alien technology, and these Manhunter guys come calling, giving Hal someone to fight, which leads to an especially silly battle in the sky over Coast City, in which a robot sucks all the power out of Hal’s ring, but he chases it in a fighter jet, and even though he promises to return it to the Air Force without a scratch, he promptly crashes it (he somehow manages to crash pretty much every plane he flies, making him the worst pilot ever), then gets his power back by reciting the Green Lantern Oath (which is how he usually recharges the ring from his own portable lantern; this is a pretty serious design flaw in the Manhunter robot), and the super-powerful machine is defeated when some rubble from the plane it just destroyed hits it on the head.

That’s how most of these plots work themselves out, by taking leaps that really don’t make any sense. In a later story, Hal and a couple of his fellow pilots get shot down over Chechnya and spend a few months in a prison camp, all because he likes to court danger by not wearing his ring when he flies. That’s a dumb way to start a plot, even if it’s already been established that Hal is a thrill-seeker and a doofus, but there are a hell of a lot of super-people who should have rescued them at some point. The Justice League shows up and apologizes, saying that they thought he was off in space, but none of his fellow Green Lanterns (three of whom are also from Earth) thought to check up on him when he went missing? It’s all meant to give him something to angst about (since he could have saved them all in minutes if he was wearing his ring), and maybe to plug some real-world threats into the book, but it takes some serious mental contortions to even attempt to accept.

And then things get dumber when Cowgirl, one of the pilots that got shot down along with Hal (and a sexy blonde chick that immediately falls for Hal, of course), gets the chance to fly a mission and avenge herself on the Chechen terrorists, and is promptly shot down again (the Air Force being rather carefree with their planes). Hal goes back to save her, and he’s not messing around this time:

That image is supposed to be awesome and badass, but it makes Hal look like an idiot, since he has already flown over the terrorist camp, but he’s still shooting, presumably into the air. He then gets involved in a tiresome international incident, leading a bunch of brainwashed superheroes and a bunch of Russian soldiers wearing robot armor to attack him, along with some bounty hunters, and even the rest of the Justice League. Amusingly, all these guys get into a big battle, but Hal wanders off to keep looking for Cowgirl, and everyone else apparently decides to just go home, since that’s the last we see of them.

Then it’s time to reintroduce another villain: Star Sapphire, whose redesigned costume has been the target of much ire. This involves Hal’s ex-girlfriend, Carol Ferris, who was possessed by an alien crystal and became a villain, but this time around, the crystal, which is sent by an alien race called the Zamarons, alternates between Carol and Cowgirl, and it wants to mate with Hal, because he’s so awesome, all the ladies want to get with him, even the alien ones (who still have the voluptuous physiques superhero fans crave, making interspecies love cool and sexy instead of weird and creepy). It’s rather embarrassing to see so much love directed at the dumbass hero, as if Johns has a total crush on him and tries to act it out through his sexy lady characters. There’s a bunch of nonsense about the Zamarons being avatars of love, but their version of love involves being very possessive and controlling, and they like to cover entire planets with stasis-inducing crystals, because they love them so much and want to protect them. Geoff Johns obviously has some issues with women.

So now that Johns has reestablished Green Lantern, reintroduced a bunch of the supporting cast, and tried to ground the character in something approximating the real world, he promptly takes off into the stratosphere and shifts the focus to large-scale outer space conflicts.

Part 2: Johns Gets Too Big for His Britches

Johns began hinting at ideas like “the emotional spectrum” and “the blackest night” in earlier issues, but he really kicks that stuff into gear in “The Sinestro Corps War”, a long storyline that sees the villainous Sinestro, a former Green Lantern who went bad, start his own lantern corps, tinted yellow and powered by fear. That is, they inflict fear, because they’re a bunch of scary monsters and evil murderers, and they want to kill all the Green Lanterns. This leads to a series of violent fight scenes, with lots of characters on both sides being viciously killed. Johns tries really hard to sell the scale of the threat, with Sinestro recruiting big-time villains like the Cyborg Superman (the villain behind the infamous “Death of Superman” story of the 90s), Superboy Prime (an evil version of Superboy from an alternate universe that was the villain of the Johns-written event crossover Infinite Crisis), and the Anti-Monitor (the reality-destroying villain of the crossover that began them all, Crisis on Infinite Earths), and he has Kyle Rayner, the guy who replaced Hal as Green Lantern when he was evil/dead, get possessed by the fear entity Parallax (the one that turned Hal evil), which gives him a monstrous evil grin/sneer, along with some other especially grotesque (and kind of Freudian) visuals:

This is actually one of the more innocuous stories in Johns’ tenure on the series, since it’s pretty much non-stop, large-scale action, with the Sinestro Corps attacking Oa (the Green Lanterns’ headquarters), various lanterns attacking the Sinestros’ headquarters (including a scene in which Hal steals a bunch of yellow rings, for little reason other than to recreate the cover of the issue where he went crazy and killed everyone), and everyone converging on Earth for a big smackdown, which the Green Lanterns win when the Guardians (the little blue dwarves who are in charge of all the Green Lanterns) rewrite their laws in order to allow the use of lethal force (which turns out to be Sinestro’s plan, since he just wants to bring fascist order to the universe, and the deployment of lethal force is key to doing so). The relatively straightforward nature of the story doesn’t stop it from including all sorts of idiocy and tastelessness though. For one, Sinestro manages to get Parallax to possess Kyle Rayner by revealing that his (Kyle’s) mother was killed by a member of the Sinestro Corps who is a sentient virus. Why that makes him scared rather than angry is unknown. Dumber still is a scene in which we learn Hal’s greatest fear, which is that he’ll never know what his father’s last words were:

Does that even make sense? What a weird thing to be scared of. That’s pretty typical of Johns though; he tries to work in dramatic moments that fit the themes he tries to write about (in this case, “fear”), while constantly mashing on the buttons labeled “Hal is awesome and everyone loves him” and “Hal wanted to fly just like his father”. The most cringe-worthy moment in this entire story comes when Sinestro and his minions are attacking Coast City, and Hal broadcasts a notice through everyone’s TV to evacuate the city for their own safety, but the people have learned through his example to have no fear, so they all stay and shine green lights through their windows to show their support. Aside from the question of why everyone has green cellophane lying around their houses, they’re just being really fucking stupid, intentionally putting themselves in harm’s way and giving the bad guys targets to use against the Green Lanterns, all as a meaningless gesture.

The rest of the battle is all pretty fine, aside from regular bits of ultraviolence and other such ridiculousness thrown in on both sides. It’s a pretty gleeful orgy of killing, with background characters regularly chopping each other’s heads off and tearing each other in half. The cover of one of the issues shows the Statue of Liberty being replaced by a statue of Sinestro, but it’s not meant to be symbolic; one of the first things the bad guys do after attacking Earth is build a big Sinestro statue, since they have weird priorities. The bad sentient virus infects Guy Gardner (another Green Lantern from Earth), but he is saved when a microscopic Green Lantern enters his bloodstream and rescues him. Amusingly, the Cyborg Superman just wants to die, and when it looks like he’s going to get his wish, a single tear emerges from his one human eye and rolls down his cheek. And while this moment isn’t written by Johns, but rather Peter J. Tomasi in the sister Green Lantern Corps title, it’s definitely worthy of inclusion in a tallying of the story’s hilariously awful moments:

There’s also a scene in which Parallax manages to possess both Kyle and Hal at the same time, and they overcome it by looking at a painting that Kyle’s mother bequeathed to him (???) and crawl out of its mouth in a particularly disgusting scene:

But the big, “important” moment of the story, a revelation that would shape the series from this point forward, is when we learn all about the “emotional spectrum”, a whole series of lantern corps that will emerge, beginning an epic “War of Light”. In addition to green for willpower (which Johns apparently thinks is an emotion), there’s yellow for fear (Sinestro’s corps), red for rage, orange for avarice (green, for envy or greed, would make more sense here, but it was already taken), blue for hope, indigo for compassion, and violet for love (the Star Sapphires). And so begins the simplification of all emotion down into a small number of possibilities (what about happiness, despair, betrayal, regret, or, I dunno, nostalgia?), creating fodder for innumerable stories in which different colors can fight each other with a “my hope shall overcome your rage!” simplicity to their actions. As dumb as this idea is, it’s a concept that could work well enough for kiddie entertainment, like something out of Care Bears or My Little Pony, but wedding it to regular maimings, the constant spilling of blood, ridiculously-proportioned women thrusting their secondary sexual characteristics at the reader, and teeth-gritted angsting about law and justice turns it all into a loud, garish mess.

We also learn that this is all leading up to the zombie-riffic “Blackest Night” story, but we’ve gotta take a break first (lest the constant high-stakes mayhem become more exhausting than it is already), so why not run in place for a bit?

Part 3: Howsabout a Pointless Origin Story?

Yes, the main thing that comes in between “The Sinestro Corps War” and “Blackest Night” is “Secret Origin”, a revised retelling of how Hal first became a Green Lantern. It’s pretty much a redo of the story we’ve already heard several times over (since this is superhero comics, it gets recapped every few issues anyway), with changes to make it more directly relevant to the stories Johns is currently telling. For instance, when Abin Sur, the Green Lantern who crashed his spaceship on Earth and gave his ring to Hal Jordan, was flying to Earth, he was bringing along a murderous alien called Atrocitus (yes, that’s really his name; Johns is amazing at coming up with the most obvious names possible for bad guys, including a member of Sinestro’s corps called Arkillo), for no reason other than to insert him into Hal’s origin story. Hal and Sinestro end up hunting him down, which inadvertently leads to the origin of the villain Black Hand when he comes into possession of a “cosmic divining rod” (a device that sucks up Green Lantern powers and then shoots them back out as death rays) that Atrocitus built. For a couple of space cops, Hal and Sinestro do a remarkably poor job of containing stray weapons.

The best (that is, most hilariously ham-fisted) moment of this origin story comes when Hal decides to hunt down Carl Ferris, the man who ran the aeronautics company his father was working for when he crashed his plane and died, because he’s sure that Ferris murdered his father. But it turns out that his father’s death destroyed Ferris, and his guilt and sadness has driven him to get cancer, leaving him on his deathbed. Oh, such misdirected anger! This leads Hal to sit on some remote mountain bluffs and use his ring to create an image of his father in order to have it smile and give his approval:

So there’s the real reason for the flashback: dealing with daddy issues. Back in the present, Johns introduces the Red Lanterns, who are led by Atrocitus, who is now boiling over with rage and seeking vengeance on Sinestro. These guys are the ones that gave us several especiallyatrociouscovers, the likes of which keep driving customers from comic book stores, and they’re kind of the point at which Geoff Johns tips over into self-parody. The anger powers of the Red Lanterns manifest themselves as acidic blood that they projectile vomit at their enemies, which is rather disgusting. They’re presented as mindless minions of Atrocitus, barely able to keep themselves in check, and their ranks include a kitty cat for some reason, since I guess cats are known for holding grudges or something. In their introduction story, Sinestro, who was captured by the Green Lanterns at the end of the “Sinestro Corps War” storyline, is scheduled to be executed, but they decide to have it done on his home planet, which is a really stupid idea, since transporting him anywhere makes an easy opening for attack. And sure enough, that’s what happens, with some Sinestro Corps members trying to free their leader, but everyone being overtaken by some Red Lanterns, and Hal being sent to save him, or possibly execute him himself, whichever happens first.

This also necessitates the introduction of the Blue Lanterns, whose emotion is hope, which doesn’t really make much sense. What is hope, anyway? The desire for something good to happen? A belief in some sort of god? Is that even an emotion? And how do Blue Lanterns control this hope? Do they feel it themselves and wish really hard that they can blow shit up, or do they have to channel it from other believers? In fact, there are tons of inconsistencies in these emotional powers; Green Lanters are super-willful, so they channel their mental forcefulness into making big green weapons, and Red Lanterns are so angry that they just boil over with explosive bile, but Yellow Lanterns don’t feel fear, they inflict it. So how do they make all sorts of yellow stuff, by being super-scary? If whoever they are fighting isn’t easily frightened, are their yellow force bubbles completely ineffective? Later, we learn about compassion, its main power being that it is able to channel the other emotions and emulate them. That seems to be taking compassion as synonymous with empathy, but if that’s the case, is it even an emotion? Would anybody describe compassion as the emotion of being able to feel other emotions? And how do the various lantern corps use their powers anyway? Do they love, or hope, or covet so hard that they create objects out of their color-coded energy? What if they’re not feeling especially angry or scary that day? Do they have to be completely single-minded, focusing only on their specific emotion, to be able to do anything? Obviously, thinking too hard about this nonsense is a path to frustration and insanity, but Johns never stops delving into the intricacies of this silly system he set up, which makes the inconsistencies and poorly-thought-out ideas impossible to ignore.

Whatever the case, the Blue Lanterns include an alien named Saint Walker, and an elephant alien who is meant to be a stand-in for the Hindu god Ganesh, demonstrating that hope is meant to stand for religious belief, which Johns simplifies into meaninglessness with their oft-repeated catchphrase, “All will be well”. These guys power Hal’s ring up to 200% capacity and tag along with him to rescue Sinestro, but they get to demonstrate how great they are along the way by cooling down a star about to go supernova, saving all the inhabitants of the planet revolving around it. Interestingly, this is one of the only times in the entire series that any of the Lanterns perform their (or at least the Green shade of the spectrum’s) stated mission to patrol space, fight crime, and help people out. The rest of the series is all about people attacking Hal because they are obsessed with him, or engaging in power struggles between different colors. By including a simple moment like this, the entire premise and conflict of the series is thrown into relief, seeming like petty infighting between the powerful, who ignore the plights of those not worthy of their attention. This wouldn’t be a bad metaphor for modern society, if it was at all intended as such.

So anyway, Hal and pals go fight some Red Lanterns, and it’s really gross, full of vomit and gore, but the big moment comes when Hal gets a red ring stuck on his finger, turning him into a blood-vomiter, and then a blue one, which makes him some sort of Green/Red/Blue Lantern, since he’s so awesome he should get all the rings. There are more silly adventures, but it’s really just setting the stage for the next big crossover, which is about as Johnsian as they come.

Part 4: Geoff Johns Doesn’t Really Understand Zombies

Zombies can be used as a metaphor for any number of things, such as the inevitable approach of death or the assault of conformity, but when Geoff Johns came up with his zombie lantern epic “Blackest Night”, which stretched beyond the Green Lantern series to encompass the entire DC universe, he didn’t appear to put any thought into it other than that undead creatures are cool-looking, and maybe kind of scary because they’re unstoppable. In this form, as a bunch of deceased characters raised from the dead and turned evil when a swarm of black rings spreads throughout the universe and possesses various corpses, they’re kind of a creepy menace almost entirely through sheer numbers, but the menace of the huge, unstoppable army is kind of diluted, since we’ve already seen hordes of Sinestros, Manhunters, Red Lanterns, etc. attack our heroes. What should be effective imagery is already kind of tired, and the obnoxiousness of Johns’ zombies ruins most of the effect anyway. The best thing that can be said about the story is that it’s fairly effective as an example of large-scale action and that Johns seems like he might be attempting to make a statement about the ever-temporary nature of death in superhero comics, but if that’s the intent, it’s as muddled as all hell.

The main crime here though is the zombies themselves, which depart from the silent, brainless monsters of Dawn of the Dead and the like by being downright talkative. Johns is going for an assault on the emotions of the living heroes, having their dead friends and family returning and attacking them both physically and verbally. The thing is, these zombies never shut up. They are the most annoying fucking villains in modern superhero comics (and that’s saying something), trying to provoke the heroes by invoking their failures and assaulting them where it’s really supposed to hurt, then killing them as viciously as possible. Early on, Hawkman and Hawkgirl are attacked by Ralph Dibny (a.k.a. the Elongated Man) and his wife Sue (who, as a former happily married crime-solving team, have been some of the most debased characters of the last decade or so of superhero stories, Sue’s rape and murder being the centerpiece of the much-lamented story Identity Crisis), who taunt them crudely, then viciously murder them and tear their hearts out:

More of this sort of thing follows, with some especially egregious examples including zombie Firestorm attacking his replacement and torturing and murdering his girlfriend while forcing him to watch, or Jean Loring (Atom’s ex-wife, and the murderer of the aforementioned Sue Dibny) showing up to murder some heroes and scream such classic lines as “No one ever believed in him. Not until you came along tonight. And that glimmer of hope you ignited in him tasted so good.” It’s all rather gross and nasty, and while it’s meant to be shocking, it’s really just tiresome. As we learn, it’s all part of the main villain’s scheme, which requires the zombies to provoke emotions, which will then power him up for his attack on Earth. How this makes any sense is beyond me (why does a master of death need to drain emotions? What do emotions have to do with death at all, except as a way to connect this nonsense to Johns’ ongoing color-war plot?), and the scenes of zombie attacks are eye-rollingly dumb, as various characters are seen via zombie-vision to glow with whatever color on the “emotional spectrum” corresponds with whatever single emotion they are currently feeling, thus allowing the zombies to steal those colors when they kill them. It’s sheer stupidity, but while it drives the early chapters of the story, it’s mostly forgotten when Nekron, some sort of death god and the true villain behind the black lanterns, rises and starts his attack, eventually revealing that his real target is “the Entity”, the spirit of life, which was hidden within the Earth billions of years ago.

During all this, Green Lantern goes on a quest across the galaxy to unite all the different color rings as an attack against Nekron. He picks up his old girlfriend Carol, who is now a Star Sapphire wielding the power of love and wearing a skimpy costume; Sinestro; Saint Walker; Atrocitus; Larfleeze, a warthog-like alien who has the orange-tinted power of being greedy and saying “Mine!” a lot (which is supposed to be funny, but is just really annoying); and Indigo-1, the leader of the compassion-shooting Indigo Tribe, who get introduced as a bunch of mysterious, loincloth-wearing, gibberish-talking aliens in the middle of all the zombie chaos. Their attack on Nekron doesn’t work though, because Johns needed to drag the plot out some more, so they spend a few more issues fighting zombies, while Hal ends up getting willingly possessed by Parallax again so he can fight the Spectre, the spirit of God’s vengeance (who takes the form of a giant, pale guy wearing a green cloak and underwear), who was somehow also turned into a zombie, and then Nekron possesses all the heroes who have died and been resurrected at some point, like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow. The Barry Allen version of the Flash, who had recently been brought back to life some twenty years after he died in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Hal Jordan manage to escape being possessed though, because they’re Johns’ favorites.

And then, in an especially silly plot point, somebody reveals that all the different rings are based on Oan technology (even though, as we saw in previous stories, some of them apparently manifested spontaneously through accumulated emotion or something), and the “Book of Oa” (a giant book that the Guardians keep around, because that’s how billion-year-old guys with unimaginably complex technology would store a repository of their laws and history) states that during “the blackest night”, which had been prophesied for thousands of years, Green Lanterns can deputize somebody else for twenty-four hours. This is an excuse for all the colored lanterns to recruit another character to their teams, and for the artists to come up with new costume designs for familiar characters. So, Flash becomes a Blue Lantern (he has a lot of hope, I guess), Atom becomes a member of the Indigo Tribe (because Johns established him earlier in the story as being especially compassionate, showing that he didn’t blame his murderous ex-wife for her crimes), Mera (Aquaman’s wife, who Johns has decided is an important character) becomes a Red Lantern, Wonder Woman becomes a Star Sapphire (mostly so she can get a skimpier version of her costume), Batman villain the Scarecrow becomes a Yellow Lantern (his deal is that he gives people a drug that brings their nightmares to life, although Johns makes him a fear-addict here so he can be all crazy with the yellow fear powers), and Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor becomes a greedy Orange Lantern.

As with most of Johns’ comics (and superhero comics in general, really), this is action figure storytelling, grown men playing with toys and trying to think of cool playsets to build and different childish conflicts for them to get into, but while that sort of thing can have its charms (most Hollywood action movies aren’t much different), Johns turns it into a distasteful exercise in arrested development, trying desperately to make it serious and dark and violent and “adult”. Hence the nasty stuff with the zombies, the constant sexualization of any female characters (even the weird alien ones), or the more ridiculous stuff he comes up with later, like a scene in which zombie Aquaman presents Mera with a reanimated version of their dead baby, and she vomits red blood-acid all over it:

Even dumber is when Johns uses the revelation of the white Entity as a chance to combine his color-coded emotion system with Christian mythology in a retelling of the origin of life that incorporates all the nonsense he created over the course of his years of color-based storytelling, casting the orange power of avarice as the snake that influenced Eve in the Garden of Eden, showing how Cain’s murder of Abel birthed the red power of rage, and so on. It’s so idiotic as to be kind of daringly subversive, or so I might think if I didn’t believe that Johns takes it all very, very seriously.

The good guys win in the end, of course, although there’s at least one hiccup along the way when Sinestro assumes the power of the Entity and becomes a White Lantern. But he can’t control it, and Hal ends up being the one who defeats the power of death by uniting all the other resurrected heroes and then bringing Nekron’s sidekick back to life, causing him to vomit up a bunch of white rings and destroy Nekron. At least, I think that happens; it gets pretty hard to follow, as usually happens with this cast-of-thousands clusterfucks. There’s some business about various dead heroes being resurrected for some mysterious purpose, which led into another series called Brightest Day that I don’t think I can bear to inflict upon myself after this much Johns exposure. I think the big mystery turns out to be the return of Swamp Thing though, but a version of the character that does its best to negate any changes wrought upon the franchise by Alan Moore, since Johns, ever loyal to his employers, knows which side his bread is buttered on.

Part 5: Oh God, This Just Keeps Going

Uniting everyone in the universe to shoot a bunch of colored beams around and defeat death itself is only a stop along the journey for Johns, who just keeps trucking along with his candy-colored epic, doing his best to inflict sensory overload on his readers through more and more battles between feelings. The next phase of the story sees Hal and friends seeking out the “entities” of all the different lanterns, the various spirits that embody the emotions behind the colors, in an attempt to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. It’s as misguided and weird as ever, including at least one perfect example of Johns’ dunderheaded take on what are supposed to be the basic building blocks of the human experience. That would be the fact that the love entity is a vicious monster called the Predator (did I mention that Johns must have had some relationship problems at some point?) who possesses a stalker guy and turns him into a nasty killer. And of course, the male version of a Star Sapphire gets to wear a head-to-toe costume that puts him into pretty striking contrast to the flesh-revealing scraps of fabric(?) that barely cover his female minions:

Johns even tries to have his cake and eat it too, by having Carol complain about having to wear a swimsuit while fighting evil across the universe (even though other Star Sapphires are shown as wearing versions of the costume that aren’t as revealing) and including a scene in which she bumps into a guy on the street who spills a drink on her boobs and then leers at her along with his fellow frat boys, as if we’re supposed to frown upon that objectification of women, then ogle the cleavage pushed into our faces a few pages later.

In other nonsense, Atrocitus searches for his own rage entity, which is a giant bull called the Butcher. Let me repeat that: it’s a bull. Called the Butcher. Did nobody notice the irony there? Johns actually tries to make Atrocitus a sympathetic character, with his clumsy attempts at character development being pretty amusing as he comes across a prison full of murderers and just executes them all with his red vomit:

He also fights the Spectre in the middle of an execution, during which the man being electrocuted taunts his victim’s father, then gets all scared and sorry when the father gets possessed by the Butcher and turns into a vengeance-fueled monster. As much as Johns seems to want to use these emotion-colors to tell stories, he’s got nothing interesting to say about them, or any depth to any of his characters. The killer is unrepentant and evil, ready for death, but he still cracks and starts begging for his life when the various scary monster characters attack him. The father is sad and angry, and I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him as he cries and screams and turns into a killer himself. But there’s no attempt to address the morality of capital punishment or the effect that violent revenge might have on those who carry it out; it’s all just window dressing for aliens and costumed creatures to fight over who gets to wield power. Johns does seem to be trying to add some depth to Atrocitus’ character, making him a sad, tortured being under his raging exterior, but since he’s designed as a fanged, screaming, blood-puking monster, it ends up being pretty amusing when he tries to actually emote:

In other entity-chasing antics, Hector Hammond escapes from prison and gets possessed by Ophidian, the orange snake-monster of avarice; a girl who was kidnapped by a serial killer becomes the host of Adara, the hope entity that looks like a three-headed eagle for some reason; and a selfless paramedic gets a page or two to argue with a colleague over whether they should treat somebody who doesn’t have insurance before Proselyte, the giant octopus avatar of compassion (since octopi are the most empathetic of all the animals, of course), takes him over. But that gets ignored pretty quickly in favor of the introduction of a mysterious villain that turns out to be Krona, who has his own backstory that is much too tiresome to explain, even though it gets revisited several times over the course of the next bunch of issues. He’s a rebel Guardian, and he wants revenge, or he wants to rule the universe, or he wants to kill everyone, or there’s some other explanation and goal for his villainy, but it really doesn’t matter; he’s just the next big bad guy to fight.

So Hal and his multicolored buddies have to jet around the universe doing more ring-zapping, but not before he has a long, tiresome argument with the Flash about how he’s a jerk and impulsive and doesn’t accept help from his friends and doesn’t follow rules and blah blah blah, and Flash gets possessed by Parallax and they fight, and there’s an especially dumb discussion of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that I suspect Johns got from watching the Mel Gibson movie Ransom rather than reading the actual book. Hal turns down help from his friends in the Justice League because he’s too cool for them, and he goes off to space with his colored-ring pals, and they all get sucked into a giant book of forbidden Green Lantern lore, and oh god, this is so stupid, and it just keeps going and going and going.

Actually, at this point, the series has reached a state of sublime stupidity, a childlike “and then this happened, and then this happened” sort of storytelling equilibrium, and while it’s certainly not good, it’s mostly readable, and one almost wants to keep plowing through it just to see what contortions to the rainbow-feelings cosmos Johns will come up with next. Krona takes over the Green Lanterns, cramming the different entities into all the Guardians and revealing some amusingly bizarre designs:

Then he brainwashes all the Green Lanterns, which forces Hal and the other human Green Lanterns to switch to different-colored rings. This necessitates more costume redesigns, including some especially awful purple camouflage fatigues for John Stewart:

Then Hal and Guy Gardner get captured, and Krona intends for them to get turned into Guardians, but that’s just a cruel tease, because who wouldn’t have wanted to see them as macrocephalic dwarves? Then there’s more fighting, and it all ends kind of suddenly (I suspect the story was compressed a bit in order to reach an end in time for DC’s latest universe-wide reboot) with Hal’s ring being taken away and Sinestro becoming a Green Lantern, and a final panel that I wish was the actual end of the series:

Of course, after the big “New 52″ reboot, Johns picked up right where he left off, with more of the same characters zooming around space and arguing over rings and colors and Guardians, but this presents a perfect jumping-off point, enabling me to attempt to keep what’s left of my sanity after immersing myself in this moronic view of the emotional cosmos.

In Conclusion, If Anybody Is Still Reading

With this apparently being the maximum amount of Geoff Johns comics as I can take, I’m left with a few questions (mostly why I exposed myself to such mental toxicity) and observations. It seems to me that Johns, in an attempt to weave a grand, expansive cosmos around his favorite character, fundamentally misunderstood the basis of the idea behind it, and managed to turn it from sort-of science fiction into dorky fantasy, with an air of “sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic” legitimacy to it. The original concept behind Green Lantern is that the rings can create constructs of energy (or “plasma” or something, for writers who wanted to sound scientific), and mastering their use took a great deal of willpower, even if that’s a nebulous concept in and of itself. But Johns decided that the green energy itself <em>was</em> willpower, which, if he considered it an emotion, opened the gateway to a whole range of other emotions, and he extrapolated outward to a grand vista of colored feelings, a whole spacetime-spanning, multi-front war of shifting alliances, reversals, betrayals, and ever-more-grand-and-violent battles. That sort of massive-scale ambition is kind of commendable, and, sure, it could be a good basis for a kiddie cartoon of some sort, but Johns takes it all so damn seriously. He tries to retell the origin of life and address the nature of death and the afterlife. He has characters confront the horrors of genocide and debate the morality of capital punishment. He attempts to delve into the nature of “pure” emotions themselves and see how they can be manipulated, twisted, or channeled by people. This seems like it’s more than just a big spandex space opera to him; it’s a way of life.

That’s what ultimately sours me on the entire enterprise: the need to turn what could be dumb-but-enjoyable action-adventure stories into some sort of statement, even if that statement is just “look how mature and adult this is!” That’s the nature of superhero comics these days, adding sex (or hints in that direction, mostly consisting of skimpy costumes and cleavage/upskirt viewing angles for female characters) and violence (which is not nearly as coy, usually being front-and-center on the page and as gory as possible) to the children’s entertainment which the creators and the audience have such nostalgia for. Johns’ ambition in revamping and “maturing” the characters and milieus that he loved so much as a kid is obvious, but while he may have stumbled upon some halfway decent ideas and managed to put together some pretty good action sequences, the execution is so blunt and dumb, full of ridiculous nonsense and crammed with tawdry attempts to make the stories “dark”, that anyone in their right mind should just laugh, rather than celebrate him as some sort of master storyteller.

So what’s the big takeaway from this overlong exercise? Are Johns’ comics as terrible as I always thought they were? I’m tempted to say that they’re not, but that would probably be Stockholm Syndrome speaking. Really, they’re pretty awful from top to bottom, full of nonsensical twists and terrible dialogue (seriously, a little bit of wit would go a long way; instead, the stories are full of lines like “This rainbow rodeo’s locked and loaded!” and “I hope it still will be [enjoyable] when my foot’s up your wrinkled blue ass!”).

Some storylines are more palatable than others, with one big reason: the artist. Ivan Reis illustrates the majority of Johns’ tenure on the character, including the Blackest Night crossover, and he approaches the material in much the same way as Johns: seriously and reverently. His characters are all gritted teeth, bulging muscles, and staid heroism, which only exacerbates the pompous and “important” presentation of the whole stupid business. He does cram lots of detail into his pages, although this eventually gets exhausting; Blackest Night has what must be at least a half-dozen spreads of thousands of characters (zombie superheroes, zombie villains, Green Lanterns, more zombies, etc.) charging at the reader, to the point that all impact is lost by the time the story drags to an end. Doug Mahnke, on the other hand, brings a bit of humor and energy to the proceedings that other artists lack, providing enough exaggeration and strangeness as to make things occasionally seem more farcical and less self-conscious. He can’t completely overcome Johns’ stupidity, but he definitely makes it more enjoyable.

But no, some very minor redeeming qualities and backhanded praise aside, this is a collection of modern superhero comics that begs to be ignored and forgotten by anyone with half a brain. It’s certainly not the worst thing out there (just read a few issues of the Green Lantern Corps tie-ins that get packaged along with the main series in the compilation volumes to see stories that are uglier and worse-written), but it surpasses those lesser efforts through sheer influence. Somehow, Johns has determined how to push the nostalgia buttons of man-children like himself who can’t manage to expand the boundaries of their sphere of knowledge beyond stories of muscular behemoths in colorful, skin-tight costumes beating each other into oblivion, and he has shaped the industry to his liking, convincing everyone that this is how superhero stories should be told. It’s an impressive feat, especially considering that he doesn’t have the cleverness of a Joe Casey or Grant Morrison, the cult of personality of a Brian Michael Bendis or Warren Ellis, or the humanity of a Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek. Those writers might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’ve all proven themselves to be miles beyond Johns in creativity, style, and just plain comics-writing chops, but as so often happens in the world of commercial art, mediocrity rises to the top. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If, when presented with the chance to read Geoff Johns comics, we can all pledge to at least consider something else, something better, something that might not suck, then maybe, just maybe, this world will be a slightly less stupid place. Join me, if you will, in this goal: to lower the readership of Geoff Johns comics by .01%. We can do it, people!
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

128 Comments

Oh my god. I got bored just reading the summary. Maybe you answer this after where I gave up on this post, but… why did you keep reading this? I just don’t understand, I hear so many people bitching about superhero comics, but they keep reading them! You get what you deserve.

I wonder if the summary makes the series out to be worse than it actually is. Because this recitation makes it look like a blight on human existence. So this guy is now the Chief Creative Officer for DC. I suppose there isn’t that much correlation between quality and sales but selling stupid fanfic quality comics like this can’t help.

I think I read something like the first issue of Blackest Night at a bookstore, it’s pretty much all I’ve read of Johns. I got the impression he has craft chops (And I think they drew the evil rings kinda hovering around, sort of like a design motif, that was a visual flourish I liked) but relishes in gore, violence, nostalgia, and really banal superhero cliches like “It’s hard being a superhero in this grim and gritty modern comics world” and “Gushuck, things were more innocent in 60s comics!” and “Superduperviolence!”

I also got the sense he has nothing to say about the world or human condition…

“being the shoddy model for the entire company to follow”

Yeah, sort of. Scott Snyder seems the more critically acclaimed “big writer” at DC at the moment, and he sure seems to also love his gore and violence! (In fairness, I think he might have a horror background?)

Scott Synder said the other day in interview that he loves Joker cause Joker rapes and stuff.

Reportedly he said about an upcoming joker crossover:

“Since the court jester’s role in a king’s court was to deliver the worst news to make the king stronger, this is how Joker sees himself, and feels that Batman’s forgotten the Joker’s necessity and wants to “punish” him for it. He will “rape, and kill, and mutilate” to bring terror to the doors of Batman’s friends.

I tried a few issues of Batgirl by Gail Simone, and it’s all flashbacks to the super gorey and rapey “The Killing Joke” comic, Batgirl is all, “I’m sad that I was shot by the Joker in the 80s.”

That’s the whole point of the anniversary of hate, isn’t it? I know I haven’t liked the Geoff Johns comics I’ve sampled previously, but I still see people praising him, so I wanted to get a full picture of exactly what he brings to the table and try to figure out what does and doesn’t work, and why, as well as how it sort of epitomizes modern superhero comics. Plus, as we’ve discussed in another post, I thought this would be a good opportunity to try to flex the negativity muscles and explain why something sucks instead of just assuming it does. I tried to give it a fair shake, in that while I expected it to be bad, I at least took it on its own terms, looking at it as a big action story, yet still finding lots of inconsistencies, shallowness of character, plot holes, and things that just plain didn’t make sense. Was it worth it? Sure, it was kind of fun to just write a bunch of takedowns of stupidity, and it was a good reminder why I pretty much ignore superhero comics these days. I’ll try to stick to the good stuff now, or at least things that are original in their badness.

I suppose I might have been throwing myself on the grenade, so to speak, but I think it was just a matter of setting a goal to get through a certain number of books. I was able to check them all out from the library, at least, so I didn’t waste any money on the endeavor.

It’s funny though that Bert’s being excoriated for not reading enough Chris Ware, while you get questioned for reading too much Johns. Again, it’s the paradox of negative criticism; if it’s horrible, why read it? But if you don’t read (enough of) it, are you allowed to criticize it?

Oh my god, this was such an awesome takedown. Zombie. shark. ZOMBIE SHARK. I eventually lost track of who was supposed to be good or bad, or what people were spitting (mostly acid, I guess, but WHY?), in the mind numbing what the fucking fuck of it all. Great job!

The only thing I thought of when the “want to write about hating something” was Johns’ “Infinite Crisis”–but the thought of reading it again was too much for me. Matthew’s efforts here…to read something of the same, or worse, horrid quality at much greater length, is truly more superhuman than anything Hal Jordan’s done lately. Sounds beyond godawful (and the scans confirm…)

I remember being fond of some old GL’s (Steve Englehart? Dave Gibbons? Joe Staton?…and Gil Kane did GL for awhile, didn’t he?). Rereading them would probably be a disappointment… but this stuff is definitely a desecration of a character and a concept regardless.

One of the problems with this writeup is that, in trying to paint this comic as the dumbest thing in existence, you’ve actually made it sound INCREDIBLY ENTERTAINING.

But the main issue is that it doesn’t seem to be intended primarily as a critique of the work itself so much as an attack on its readership. Per the article, the summary of all this is that the writing of Geoff Johns “begs to be ignored and forgotten by anyone with half a brain.” The audience for Johns’ work is described as “man-children like himself who can’t manage to expand the boundaries of their sphere of knowledge beyond stories of muscular behemoths in colorful, skin-tight costumes beating each other into oblivion.” That same audience is then implored to take the author’s advice by reading something better. But what is “better”? No specific titles are named other that citing other big name US comics authors with very extensive bodies of work.

This approach is probably not going to convert anyone over. What current fan of the Green Lantern comics is actually going to read what is written above and be inclined to follow that advice after being repeatedly told “this comic is only successful because it caters to you MAN-CHILDREN who need to just GROW UP ALREADY”? Few, if any, I imagine. Particularly since, as noted, this is one of the most popular titles sold via the US direct market after years of Green Lantern not being that high-profile a series.

It’s fine to say “I don’t care for the current state of mainstream comics,” but it’d be more effective to simply state that directly. Perhaps contrast a storyline or theme which Green Lantern handled “poorly” with an instance of it being done “right.” As it stands, this writeup is pretty much a pat-on-the-back to all the people who currently don’t read this stuff anyway.

Well, Derik disagrees with that. So do I, really. It doesn’t sound entertaining at all, much less incredibly entertaining. It sounds wretched.

I don’t think the point of writing something like this is necessarily to convince anyone. It’s looking at a pretty important series and thinking about why it’s horrible, which seems to me like it has relevance for anyone interested in comics in general and the mainstream in particular.

Also…just as one example, I happen to care about zombies and how they work; Matt’s comments about talking zombies are I think spot on, and a fairly interesting comment on how zombies do (and don’t) work. (I’ve thought something similar before, so it’s not a revelation or anything, but it is a good point to make, and one which I think Matt handles well.)

A lot of these attacks could really be labeled at any adults into superheroes, (even fans of the better superhero material like Watchmen, you could make the argument that it’s nostalgia porn for men who need graphic violence and sexual violence to feel like they are reading something for grownups, I guess the only difference is that it has other things going for it.) These attacks have little to do with Geoff Johns.

I mean, to me the Whedon Avengers movie is a 120 minute Saturday Morning Cartoon. No meat there at all. You could make the argument that people who like it are “Man- children” (or whatever the gender neutral version of that is) but given its success, you’d be attacking American culture in general, methinks?

Nothing wrong with that. If the critique works more generally, that seems like it’s more worth making, not less.

Watchmen’s pretty clearly about critiquing the adolescent power fantasies of superhero fans. You could certainly argue that its critique reifies rather than undermines those fantasies — but Moore’s definitely making an effort.

Y’know, 90% of Superhero comic readers hate random violence and sex as much as you do. That is the 90’s were hated so much. Plus, calling them adult children makes you seem a bit mature. It makes look you look smug and feel proud for reading “Grown-up comics”. I prefer art comics myself, but you don’t see me proud just for reading them. Feeling smug about your tastes is really childish. I know a lot of Super-hero comics reader, they;re pretty cool guys with real lives.

Maybe I am being smug, but the thing is, I don’t want to hate superheroes. Done well, they can be enjoyable and entertaining, like a good action movie or something. But this kind of nonsense is the current model for “mainstream” superhero storytelling, and as such, it deserves to be mocked, and I think the people who make it so successful (at least, in terms of the Marvel/DC comics industry, which isn’t actually very successful compared to most any other medium) should share in that ridicule. Calling names probably won’t change minds, but hey, that’s not really what the Hooded Utilitarian is about, especially during the Anniversary of Hate.

At points in this critique, I was reminded of the question of why the Jedi would use light sabers rather than laser guns. Is ‘Sinestro’ a less silly name than ‘Atrocitus’?

I’d say there’s a difference between, say, the seriousness of Cooke’s New Frontier and that of Johns’ Green Lantern. The former really doesn’t recognize the inherent silliness of its means in attempting to say something significant about the American spirit through nostalgic superheroes, whereas the latter just sort of goes with the silliness, accepts that the story has few implications for our world and then amps the silliness up. I read the series up though the Blackest Night and found it thoroughly entertaining in the best lowbrow way (got bored with the revenants, though). I don’t disagree with Matthew’s summary, only wondering how anyone could not find vomiting bilious rage something worth spending time with. And I wonder if the real reason he was able to get so far in the story was because he was actually entertained at the time of reading it. But I don’t have moral qualms with violence as spectacle. Don’t blame my parents; they did their best (well, maybe blame my dad for all those Bronson and Eastwood movies).

I think the difference is that Sinestro was a name created for a comic whose primary audience was children in 1961, and Atrocitus a name created for a comic whose primary audience is twentysomething and older males in 2007. Context is everything, right?

Btw, I don’t actually have anything against making fun of superhero comics, just I think it childish to talk down to the audience. Even a lot of superhero fans think comics get too violent and stupid a lot of times. The audience is highly aware of the ridiculous inherent in the superhero genre, and feels that the writers take the material too serious. As an occasional reader of superhero comic(occasional because it’s a chore to follow superhero comics even casually), I feel attempts to the genre more “adult” an insult to my intelligence. Especially, when they think I would like my superheroines look even sluttier. Trust me, there was a lot of anger they took away any personality the character Starfire had, and turned her into a whore.

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? If Johns’ work is insulting to the audience’s intelligence, what does it say about the audience that he’s so successful, the company made him their Chief Creative Officer? At some point, they kind of deserve to be talked down to. And it’s not like I’m expecting them all to immediately switch to high-falutin’, artsy-fartsy comics; just don’t keep consuming the crap! Have some standards! Is that really so hard to do?

The answer, of course, is yes, it’s too goddamn hard. That’s modern American society for you. Michael Bay movies make the most money, and shows like Two and a Half Men, CSI, and American Idol get the highest ratings. The saying goes that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon, but I do reserve the right to stand in hypocritical moral superiority over everyone who doesn’t share my excellent taste. Haters unite!

As with the Wonder Woman problem addressed in another post, the issue is that these super hero stories should really be written for children (sans the man-). My daughter loves stuff like WW, but it’s hard to find age appropriate well told fare when these are being written predominantly for an adult audience.

On the topic of finding age appropriate fare, it is a challenge. Thanks to a podcast over at Comics Alliance, I recently checked out both Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade and Danger Club. Both are by Landry Walker and Eric Jones, who also, I understand, have collaborated on some stuff for Disney that’s all-ages and well-done.

The Supergirl story is a fun, six-issue, all-ages piec loosely set in the Silver Age. It is a Good Comic and a Comic a Child Could Enjoy. Based on it I checked out Danger Club, and there I encountered the problem.

Danger Club is a good comic — or at least I want to see where it’s going — but it is primarily of interest, I think, only to adults (it is definitely only for adults, based on content) who remember the Teen Titans cartoon and/or the “classic” Teen Titans comics from the 1980s. It operates entirely on the gap between the cartoony/soapy expectations on has of the Titans and the dark, violent plot it presents.

There’s nothing wrong with that kind of work per se. But who is the audience for it? What I’m saying is that it’s more than just nostalgia or graphic violence that’s the issue — it’s the tendency for even good comics to be by fanboys, for fanboys, and about fanboyism.

Or, as I told my wife when she asked if she’d like Danger Club, “No, it’s pretty far up the ass of the comics world.”

“It operates entirely on the gap between the cartoony/soapy expectations on has of the Titans and the dark, violent plot it presents.”

That’s just the “things used to be silver agey but now are grim and gritty” trope every hack superhero comic writer has been doing since the 80s.

“Danger Club is a good comic — or at least I want to see where it’s going ”

I wouldn’t call Danger Club a good comic exactly. It’s essentially about a more extreme Robin (resembling “Midnightrider” the Extreme Batman from the Authority) knockoff, a teen Nick Fury knockoff, and two other teen heroes fighting an evil Superboy knockoff (who shares the name of the Superman knockoff from the Authority) and some sort of Captain America vampire guy.

Characters traits are nonexistent, aside from things like “is sort of like Robin except Batman is his dad, not his adopted dad” or “is badass and a girl and likes to drink beer”.

Granted it may actually be better than a lot of Image books, occasionally the creative team shows some creative flourishes, but I found the violence offputting. (The girl stock character in issue 3 crying because everyone’s been murdered, and then committing suicide cause everyone’s been murdered was sort of the breaking point for me… I think that’s what happened, who cares? It’s just fight scene after fight scene.)

What’s weird is that Image seems to have a real bias towards publishing ultra violent books of various genres. I guess they sell better… hence John’s success.

I really dug Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man. Definetly good for all ages. The anti-Geoff Johns in every way possible. The focus is on humor and silliness and slapstick. Not a stretch to say it favorably compares to the Jack Cole version.

Pallas, I don’t disagree with anything you say about Danger Club, except that I think there seems to be a bit more going on than the standard grim-and-gritty stuff. Oh, and I think the point is that the characters don’t really need much development, as we recognize them. But we’ll see if the series goes anywhere — I have to admit the first issue was easily my favorite.

Jeez Matt, don’t hold back next time. At least it gave us some funny panels here, like that “I’m not handsome” one, or the one where hateful mommy spews acid on her zombie baby. That’s entertainment!

It seems like, over the long term, Geoff Johns has the “Strong-Opponent Inflation” problem identified in Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga: “often things get so out of control that by the end of the series the hero has to face a 200-foot-tall monster or some incomprehensible thing like ‘The Comic Evil Force'[!]”. I guess that’s a problem for all those cosmic-battle superhero comics — how do you keep ratcheting up the stakes when they’ve already saved the very fabric of the universe a dozen times?

Here’s an interesting (to me!) question that’s raised by some of the push-back in these comments: is it appropriate for a critic to talk smack about people who enjoy a particular work that they personally dislike? My initial feeling is that it isn’t — it always shits me when a critic disses me for liking something, especially when they speculate as to the bad/silly/morally-incriminating character traits that would lead me to enjoy something so patently terrible. You don’t know me, man; you can’t know why I do or don’t enjoy something.

…but on the other hand, I’m not sure that there is any good reason to censure critics for doing this. After all, critics routinely speculate as to the personality traits and motivations of artists, so why can’t they do the same for the audience?

…but back on the first hand, it seems like a kind of ad hominem. If an artwork is bad, it ought to be shown so on its own (de)merits, not via the failings of its audience. Plus it’s generally counterproductive: if you want to dissuade the audience from enjoyment/consumption, you probably won’t do it by insulting them (even if the insults are accurate!).

I don’t really know that it’s that easy to draw a line. Just as a work figures an author, I think a work figures an audience. Geoff Jones assumes a reader who cares about continuity porn; who finds violence exciting and interesting; who can’t follow or doesn’t care about following plot; who wants to see Star Sapphire’s tits falling out of a pink wisp of nothing. Criticizing the work is in part figuring out what it is you’re supposed to like about it, and that involves thinking about an ideal reader. And if that ideal reader seems like a sexist, drooling idiot…well, I don’t see what’s wrong in pointing that out.

What’s tricky, of course, is that an ideal reader isn’t *only* an ideal reader — or, to put it another way, you aren’t always the person you are when you read a Geoff Johns comic. People are complicated, and it is possible to want to see Star Sapphire’s fan service while still believing that in the real world women are human beings.

But…just because you aren’t always that ideal reader doesn’t mean that that ideal reader doesn’t have something to do with you. If art matters, that means it matters to somebody, and that means that somebody is being affected by it. One of the things critics do (or can try to do) is talk about the content of that affect (or effect.) And that involves talking about how the art interacts with people…which means thinking about the kind of people who are called by the art — and who answer it.

It’s essentially another version of the question of whether art is a formal exercise or whether it’s a social and historical practice. If it’s the first, then the audience and its reaction should be bracketed. If it’s the second, that bracketing becomes a lot more difficult.

That’s an good response, Noah. It sounds plausible to me that thinking about the audience can be a way of thinking about the work. Maybe my problem is just that often these “readings” of the audience are reductionist and not alive enough to the range of possibility in the work — in other words, some of the audience might be reacting to very different facets of the work from what the critic has seen, or they’re even just reacting differently to the same facets. None of which is to say that Matt is wrong in his description of the typical Johns fan…

That said, I’m not sure that this question is too closely tied to the question of purely-formal versus social/historical/ideological criticism. Someone might believe only in formal criticism but still think it valid to discuss the audience (construed somewhat ahistorically and out of any real context), precisely because doing the latter helps you figure out the former.

Yeah…the thing about sneering at comics fans, of course, is that there’s a kind of set stereotype of comics fans as stunted man-boys, so plugging into that can be a little too easy. But…the stereotype just seems so painfully accurate when you read the comics it’s hard to avoid it. It really *is* all ridiculous continuity porn and barely competent fan service. It’s like the comics are determined to caricature themselves….

“Yeah…the thing about sneering at comics fans, of course, is that there’s a kind of set stereotype of comics fans as stunted man-boys, so plugging into that can be a little too easy. But…the stereotype just seems so painfully accurate when you read the comics it’s hard to avoid it. It really *is* all ridiculous continuity porn and barely competent fan service”

I have the (semi) unfortunate experience of subscribing to Gail’s Simone’s tumblr blog, and I get the sense that she’s a fangirl accidently turned pro- and she LOVES the continuity porn and the cheesecake stuff like Power Girl’s boob window and the decadent violence. (In fact she wrote: “When they covered [Power Girl] up, it no longer FELT like Power Girl”.)

I think DC comics are largely shit, and a lot of Simone’s own stuff is pretty guilty of superhero decadence and Geoff John-esque violence (Tons of flashbacks to The Killing Joke are worked into her Batgirl stuff- cause, continuity and decadence for all!)

It’s worth noting that she doesn’t fit the “man-child” stereotype in real life, and neither do the women she seems to interact with a lot on Tumblr. (They seem to have mediocre tastes on comics though, goes without saying, though I’m sure many of them also like some good comics as well as these awful ones!)

Simone said on her tumblr she doesn’t believe the Neilsen surveys saying 90% of the readers are men, which is odd. She apparently thinks she sees women reading DC comics everywhere so the survey pulling method must be wrong….

Among female mainstream fans, it’s something of an article of faith that there are more women reading comics than are represented in the survey (or at least, it’s a talking point I’ve heard a lot.) I looked around at least once, and found something like 4 sources going back 40 years, all of which said that the breakdown was 90% male. I don’t know that there’s very good evidence one way or another…but such evidence as there is (including the comics’ content) strongly suggests that the readership very much skews male.

Again, people are complicated and idiosyncratic. I was just reading a book by a black, female metalhead, for example — there are always going to be people who are interested in things you wouldn’t expect. But…female mainstream fans very often talk about how the industry ignores them (by treating women as sex objects and victims rather than heroes, for example.) It’s hard not to feel like female mainstream fans are fans despite, not because of, the best efforts of the creative teams.

Damn, Noah, that’s an eloquent examination of something I didn’t really even consider. I suppose the generic “superhero comics reader” is something of a straw-man/stereotype, an easy target for ire when something of low quality is successful. As I mentioned above, it can be frustrating when something of such obviously poor quality is so successful, and the easy reaction is to disparage the stupidity of the audience. I think I tend to keep that sort of thing to jokes and exaggerated asides though, and I tried to engage the work itself for most of the post, digging into it and pointing out where I think it fails.

If there’s anybody who I wanted to speak to specifically, it’s the people I mentioned who should really know better. If there was one inspiration for this post, it would probably be this article on Comics Alliance, which annoyed me when I first read it, since it seemed like a defense of Johns’ work from someone I generally consider a smart writer. Rereading it now though, it seems less like a defense and more of an examination of what makes him so successful, which seems to be the one-dimensionality of his work. But I have seen other people who say he’s great at action or character or something, and I wanted to prove that notion incorrect. And immersion in this sort of nonsense for an extended period does tend to foster disgust toward all involved, from publisher to writer to reader, so I mostly just let the vitriol flow. Hey, that’s what the Anniversary of Hate is all about, right?

On a separate note, while Gail Simone and her fellow fangirls don’t fit the man-child stereotype, following sites like hers is a great way to view that type of fan in the wild. The existence of girls trying to coexist in the boys-only clubhouse tends to enrage that sort of asshole, and it’s never long before one of them stops by to drop some rape threats. Regularly seeing that sort of idiocy and abuse makes me feel a lot less compunction about insulting superhero comics readers, since they live up (down?) to the stereotype that harmless, less-passionate fans find so pernicious. So, if you’re insulted by my insinuations of your low intelligence, just realize that I’m probably not talking about you, but about the trolls who do their best to make everyone’s life worse (partly by reading Geoff Johns comics).

The problem with the use of that stereotype is that it assumes a sort of causal relation between the content and reader, rather than the subcultural habit of reading the genre. The rabid classical music fan, particularly one devoted to vinyl, could be stereotyped in an even more pathetic way, but no one is likely to blame the art for that. I know guys who can barely look at women, bathe maybe monthly, are repressed beyond belief, but can speak eloquently on the history of Handel. Really it has a lot more to do with commodity fetishism than anything else. The value arguments over aesthetics tend to confuse the problem. Quite a few people are well-adjusted with absolute abysmal taste in just about everything. That’s why we have most pop music: it’s for people who don’t really much care about music.

Also, you’re making a causal connection between the music and the audience there, aren’t you? That is, you’re linking the formal qualities of the music to a vision of the audience (as people who don’t care about music.)

Classical music is an interesting comparison…but one that it seems has a ton of differences. Probably the most salient is that the original audience is very, very long dead, which changes the calculus considerably. That is, the imagined audience isn’t around anymore, so the relationship between content and listener has a much different relationship to intentionality. But…contemporary classical music is (often) quite insular in a way that surely has to do with the tiny audience, investment in avant-garde, etc.

You say quite a few people are “well-adjusted” — but what exactly is the standard for that? Lots of people like extremely violent, crappy art in our society. You could argue without much trouble that our society is extremely violent (those defense budgets) and fairly crappy in other ways.

The issue isn’t whether folks are well-adjusted or not. It’s how the art figures its audience, and what that means for the lives, beliefs, and ethics of the audience (which is potentially everyone.) When you say that the issue is commodity fetishism, you’re not actually changing the terms of discussion, I don’t think; you’re just arguing for a different explanation.

Well, I’m changing the terms to a more social factor that stretches over a lot of media rather than delimiting it to some inherent content of a particular genre. I understand that you want the issue to be about how art figures its audience, but I’m skeptical of that being the real causal agent here. I’d like to believe good art produces good people, too, but it just ain’t so.

“Figuring” vs. “adjustment” — the difference being?

Kevin Smith seems “well-adjusted”: he’s happily married, with a kid, seems to enjoy his life, and seems to treat people decently enough. He fits what tends to be identified as a good life that most Americans would probably enjoy. One can, of course, critique all of his choices and values. But I suspect most people would find him better adjusted than Robert Crumb. Even if that’s not a correct evaluation, I wouldn’t so readily make the inverse argument that Crumb is better adjusted than Smith. Does Smith have a worse view of women than Crumb due to a worse taste in comics and art? … Or pick another example, such as an anonymous guy who really loves violent superhero comics threatening rape somewhere on the internet vs. whoever you feel is adequately well-adjusted and reads the most moral of comics.

I don’t see that the original audience being dead has much to do with the way classical music is received, or “figures” its audience. If it figures its audience, then the way its produced and received today would have something to do with that figuring. Preferably, it should (mostly) be heard live, but when they hang up all those mikes to record it, then that’s a form of cultural production — it is to become a replicable cultural product, regardless of whatever went on in the mind of the dead composer.

Also: doesn’t Star Sapphire look like a modern pop diva? Maybe she’s wearing too much clothing, isn’t quite as sexualized, but still that’s pretty much the average purveyor of all this great pop music out there.

Sorry, one more thing: my point about pop music was that despite its clearly exploiting many of the same things Johns does, its mostly not meant to be cared too deeply about. Of course, there are target, ideal, audiences for all art, and this is music that’s meant to not be thought of too deeply. It’s when someone really starts caring deeply for the art that the obsession can take hold. And that can have just as damaging effects on the classical fan as it can to some middle aged dude who’s obsessed with Katy Perry (or violent superhero comics). For most people, pop music is just another thing to do without much importance to their life.

She also just looks like crap. Sometimes pop divas don’t look so great either, of course…but in general, fashion is pretty important, and something which is thought about quite a bit. Lady Gaga’s connection to fashion and the art world is not so much exceptional as emblematic…as I think is her ambiguous queerness. Pop divas are dressing up very much for a female audience as well as a male one, and the clothes, the interest in fashion, and the whole presentation very much reflects that…as does the fact that the stars are very often female, and that the lyrics focus on women’s interests and experiences. Comics are quite different.

But I mean…if you’re saying that pop music is often quite sexist…well, duh. And is there plenty of bad pop music? Sure. But it’s hard for me to see how you can argue, on their own terms, that mainstream comics are even in the same ballpark as contemporary pop. The goal of both is to produce slick, professional, massively popular content. Mainstream comics are mostly incompetent and hardly anyone reads them. Pop music is massively influential and popular, and is extremely professional.

I guess you could argue that Johns’ is actually doing exploitation, not pop. But then there’s the nostalgic evocations of Green Lantern past and the bone-headed trumpeting of heroism…it can’t even embrace it’s own decadence, it seems like.

Oh…re the not very importance of pop music. I really think that you kind of deeply, deeply don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Pop music certainly is background music for life; it pulls in a lot of casual listeners. But if you think that Lady Gaga has fewer rabid fans than Geoff Johns, or that those fans care less about her than Johns’ cares about him…well, like I said, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

Pop music’s just bigger. It has more casual fans, more rabid fans…just more fans. And pop music is a hell of a lot more central to the culture than comics are (for better, for worse, for whatever.)

How many of the famous star-making producers are women, Noah? I’ll grant that there are some famous songwriters who are. But I agree that women tend to willingly dress more provocatively than men — didn’t we have an argument once with you disagreeing me on that? I’m not seeing why Lady Gaga gets a pass for her exploitation, but Johns doesn’t. Because of her “queerness”? Even granting that is how she uses her ass, is queer exploitation supposed to be better than hetero-exploitation? Might it be that the acceptance of exploitation in the pop music world has had an effect on what’s acceptable in the world of superhero comics? And I’m not seeing anything any more bone-headed in Johns’ comics than the self-help bullshit that Gaga gives during her performances. It’s all kind of dumb and incoherent, but I doubt it has too much to do with mechanically altering their respective audiences’ worldviews.

I think Gaga’s embrace of queerness is both a reflection of the zeitgeist and a contribution to it.

I don’t think I ever disagreed that women dress provocatively? If you’re trying to argue that that’s some kind of biological truth, then, yeah, I don’t agree with that, but I’m not arguing that we don’t have the culture we have.

I can say it again; the content purveyed by pop divas is much, much more welcoming in and interested in women. You don’t have women in refrigerators shit in Beyonce songs; instead, you have messages about women’s agency and self-worth. It can be a bit grating (Christina Aguilera is particularly wretched on this count) but it can also be funny and clever (“Put a Ring on It”) and even moving at times.

In terms of Lady Gaga, again, being queer is one way that she acknowledges the existence of and importance of female audiences (much like fashion mags.) Same with old Wonder Woman comics. The problem with Johns, etc., isn’t that there’s sex; it’s that there’s simply no interest in women, who are murdered as plot fodder and dressed in ugly, ridiculous outfits in contravention of elementary rules of logic. Heroes aren’t pop stars; what makes sense when you’re going out to be photographed is preposterous when you’re going out to fight crime. This isn’t really such a difficult concept, I don’t think; most people get it just fine, which is why Lady Gaga has an exponentially larger female following than Star Sapphire does (among other reasons.)

If Star Sapphire were dressing in meat dresses, that would be pretty cool, though.

I think “patheticness” isn’t sufficiently specific as a critical tool here. As I said, mainstream comics figures its audience in a particular way — as obsessed with desecrating juvenelia and utterly uninterested in anybody who isn’t a straight white guy, basically. Female pop R&B, on the other hand, is female-focused, enthusiastically integrated, vacillatingly but increasingly queer, and obsessed with chasing the next new shiny thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s really very different from mainstream comics, and your effort to make them equivalent just seems kind of ridiculous. People don’t get the same thing from a lady gaga song that they get from a geoff johns comic. If they did, lots more people would be reading geoff johns comics (or a lot less people listening to lady gaga albums, I guess.)

I do like the scene with Mera vomiting on her zombie baby. And the Hector Hammond panel with him whining about not being handsome is funny.

Oh…I guess I should add that in most situations of course women don’t dress any more provocatively than men. But women pop stars do…or at least provacativeness if figured differently (glammed up and lots of skin rather than casual and tough.)

…and I’m going to give you the last go round if you want it, Charles, and I’ll try to stop talking about Beyonce, Gaga, et al., since it’s obviously pretty off topic. Maybe we can do a pop diva roundtable some day, though…

geoff johns green lantern is consistently the dopest hero comic on the stands, at its best truly visionary. wasn’t henry darger like clinically retarded? wasn’t gg allin like borderline illiterate? that’s the pantheon this shit belongs to, art whose stupidity provides greater ease of access to legitimate emotion and a broader appeal. i heart these comics. green lantern #0 is currently whomping the piss out of tezuka in the “comics that heavy handedly reference u.s. military engagements” category this week.

i have a long thing about the black hand prelude issue to blackest night (gl #39?) where i compare it favorably to pim and francie, yah. i haven’t read it since i wrote it but i think i have an even higher opinion of johns since then, mostly informed by chill seshes with andy khouri, who knows him on real life. none of the stuff about bravery and hope is contrived, those are real messages he is sincerely trying to impart. how many comics, super or not, want to inspire their readers to be better people? johns is speaking a language more people understand than what pretty much anyone else in comics is speaking, and he’s working out some heavy cosmological shit with it – creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns. motherfucker is a g. also: doug mahnke consistently amazes me with the level of high focus horrorcore drafting he is able to produce on a monthly basis.

I read most of Johns’ run up through Blackest Night and now I can’t handle the idea of reading another issue. I picked up the recent GL Annual #1 and it felt like every other issue Johns wrote that was treading water between the big events.

I do enjoy the big beats of Johns’ run (Rebirth, Sinestro War and Blackest Night) as the dumb-but-enjoyable adventure stories but everything that Johns does around those stories, the bits that should be building the characters and premise for those events that show his weakness as a writer.

And that’s probably the problem- Johns isn’t a character writer but he goes after the high concepts and the splashy images without ever building the structure to support them. They’re cool because Johns thinks they’re cool without him having the skill to ever really convey that to the reader.

The problem is that Johns used to be a better character writer. His first Flash run and the first year or two of The Teen Titans are good super-hero soap operas. They are stories built at least as much on the characters as they are about the icons but that all changed after his Infinite Crisis debacle. There’s a shift in his storytelling after IC that becomes more about the thin ideas of what these costumes are about rather than doing anything with the characters in the costumes.

agreed, not always a virtue, but i think dismissing its stupidity as, uh, “stupid” and then just pointing to examples of an artwork succeeding at what it’s trying to do after leveling a value judgement against those aims is pretty um… i dunno, pretty “missing why so many people get so much out of these comics”. the whole issues with women thing merits a closer look, but it’s just used as another “yeah!” shot to the nuts here. which is fine, i do that shit all the time.

I guess so, since I think they’re both okay. Both villains’ parents were kind of condemning their children through nomenclature. If Earth ever colonizes space, we should enforce names like “Blisstro” or “Pleasantus.”

Noah,

The debate was over whether these representations are exaggerated representations of different dress styles in men and women on the streets. Women walk around with their asses hanging out where I live, but men don’t do it near as frequently. I have no idea what thread that was in, though. It had nothing to do with biological reductionism.

I’ll let you have the last, long say on modern pop music, since I don’t find it clever, or funny, or moving, or particularly queer. Someone like Lady Gaga pushes the status quo slightly without any real danger to it, which results in popular discussion and promotion for some generic music. Her catchiest song is a rip of Madonna, who pretty much developed the approach to success that Gaga is using.

It’s interesting that you find it somehow more admirable to package objectifying imagery to girls in a facile girlpower message than to sell a similar thing to men, though. And have fashion mags furthered the moral cause of women? That’s a joke.

Is it a problem that Lady Gaga isn’t particularly interested in selling something to me or you? All you’re saying is that Johns and she have their own target audiences (neither of them including me, exactly, although I do love both bloody vomit and meat in my entertainment). I can’t much muster a defense that would put the intelligence of either art over the other. It’s all kind of silly. And siding with one while looking down at fans of the other is even sillier.

Matt: You’re a smart enough guy that I know I can’t tell you you’re wrong for liking Johns’ stuff, but I do have a hard time accepting him as some sort of idiot savant. At best, he provides Doug Mahnke with the opportunities to come up with some cool imagery. That Blackest Night prologue issue is one that I’ve seen cited here and there as good horror writing, but it’s just a guy obsessed with death who murders his family, kills himself, then gets resurrected when an evil Guardian shows up and vomits up a black ring. It also pauses to spend two double-page spreads recounting every death and resurrection in DC comics, to the point of numbness. Yawn.

And when it comes to “basic human emotional concerns”, I don’t see anything worth trumpeting either. His version of hope is a vaguely religious recitation of the phrase “all will be well”, which is nearly meaningless. His idea of love is all warped, seemingly informed by bitterness toward a controlling, overprotective partner, or a feeling of being grossed out by obsessive voyeurism. Compassion seems kind of threatening, a primitive, literally tribal impulse that mind-controls villains into doing heroic acts against their will. This isn’t really relatable stuff that everyone understands, but terms that everybody knows stamped onto space creatures shooting different colored beams at each other. If he thinks he’s actually inspiring his readers with any of this nonsense, he holds them in lower regard than I do.

The stuff that’s actually recognizable in the real world is what troubles me even more, like the apparent belief that murder is acceptable when committed in revenge for “equal” sins, or the endorsement of torture when used in interrogations. And while one’s opinion on the appropriateness of violence in comics may vary, the casual murder he blithely inserts into his stories is kind of disturbing. You can see an example from a recent issue of Aquaman here; I don’t mean to be a scold, but having superheroes, who are supposed to be morally upright champions of justice that serve as examples for children, just casually impale the people who get in their way, the entire genre is pretty much fucked. And it’s Johns who is responsible for most of the fucking.

I think there’s some tension between Matt’s argument that Johns is like Darger or Hanks and his argument that he’s good because he’s inspiring or presents relatable emotions. You can be William Blake or you can be Frank Capra, it seems like, but I’m not sure how you can be both at the same time.

mileage varies on johns for sure. “That Blackest Night prologue issue is one that I’ve seen cited here and there as good horror writing, but it’s just a guy obsessed with death who murders his family, kills himself, then gets resurrected when an evil Guardian shows up and vomits up a black ring.” – if that doesn’t sound like a set of events with interesting possibilities to you then you aren’t gonna flip for that comic, but i think that stuff was wild. i won’t make the case for johns as subjectively good or even an idiot savant, but there’s a lot of interest for me in watching him alternating between struggling and cooperating with superhero tropes. not blake, not capra – maybe a hawthorne type of figure. or lovecraft…

i’m gonna talk about this all later so i’m out for now. thanks guys, fun stuff.

“…Johns’ vision is so personal and odd, what he seems to be saying about the world so strange (if he actually thinks love=the Predator is a good fit he’s not talking a language I understand, if he doesn’t but just thinks the idea is cool then I’m happy to be a dweeb), his focus so narrow, that I’m just left scratching my head.

Jarvis Cocker once made a TV series about American folk-artists and their eccentric, obsessive work, and there’s a sense in which Johns reminds me of one of those guys and I want to like his work more than I do because of it. Johns is an original: there’s no-one out there doing what he does, no-one else who would feel it important [in quite the same way] to explain the historical significance of Ion, and that’s probably a big part of why he’s so successful. But where others see awesomeness, I see comics that are fixated on comics and nothing but comics – Green Lantern comics in particular. I suppose there’s a kind of awesomeness to that, but it’s not a variety that I enjoy.”

Unlike Matt I think he’s awful, but almost awful in a very interesting way

…If Johns’ work is insulting to the audience’s intelligence, what does it say about the audience that he’s so successful, the company made him their Chief Creative Officer? At some point, they kind of deserve to be talked down to…
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Yes. And I tip my hat to you for the mind-boggling feat of researching this abominable mass of crud. Unlike those who simply say, “such-and-such is crap,” with nary a jot of supporting evidence, you thoroughly delineate example after agonizing example. Which prove that Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern comics are abysmal crapola.

(“But…the characters keep saying how cool it all is! You mean it…isn’t?”)

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Noah Berlatsky says:

…the thing about sneering at comics fans, of course, is that there’s a kind of set stereotype of comics fans as stunted man-boys, so plugging into that can be a little too easy. But…the stereotype just seems so painfully accurate when you read the comics it’s hard to avoid it. It really *is* all ridiculous continuity porn and barely competent fan service. It’s like the comics are determined to caricature themselves….
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The “superhero comics fans are more than stunted man-boys” argument misses the point. Sure, you can be an unwashed social retard and eloquently speak of Handel.

But, the thing is, there is that part of themselves — their “inner (sometimes not so hidden) fanboy” — which goes nuts for grim n’ gritty violence posing as maturity, oversexualized fan service femme fantasy figures, adolescent power-tripping rendered in anally tight, gradient-packed art. They could rightly say, “Comic Book Guy, c’est moi!”

(A variation of this phenomenon: in page 3 of Dan Clowes’ great “Ugly Girls” story — http://singleape.com/stuff/ug.html — the narrator notes, “You take a bunch of guys who have discerning taste in everything else and they’ll still go ape over the most typical, bland, Hollywood-type bimbo!”)

…And it’s that “lowest common superhero-comics-reading denominator” part which DC is shamelessly catering to. Just like porn doesn’t cater to the intellect, our spirituality, “the better angels of our nature,” but to primitive appetites.

I have no problems with Geoff Johns. I think he took on too many books at some point, and started applying the same formula a little too transparently–but I think that happens to pretty much anyone who works at these companies for an extended period of time, and ends up with a large work load. Those companies are designed to eat creators.

But I enjoyed reading his early JSA stuff, his Flash stuff, his crisis(reality punch and all), annnd up to Blackest Night his Green Lantern book. He understands very well what the contemporary modern superhero reader wants, and serves it up well.

And he does it all without also being a huge dick about it. I don’t read DC comics anymore, but Johns is in that group of people working there that if they fell on hard times and needed a dime or something, and I had a dime, I would give them said dime.

…He understands very well what the contemporary modern superhero reader wants, and serves it up well.
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A pretty damning bit of praise! Even if music to a money-lusting corporation’s ears.

Am reminded of what Gary Groth said about the posthumously-canonized Carol Kalish:

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Once I witnessed a retailer timidly question Marvel’s strategy of filling their comics with sex and violence; Kalish’s reply, which was almost refreshingly free of the specious nod to morality to which less assured marketing tacticians would resort, was that little boys liked sex and violence and Marvel was in the business of selling comics to little boys. Hence and therefore.

This is what I meant by chilling; there was an irreducible logic to her arguments that were irrefutable (except on unprofitable and therefore irrelevant moral grounds)…
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Naturally, Groth was raked over the coals for reacting to the hagiographic tone of adulation prevalent everywhere else in the industry and corporate-suckup publications such as the Comics Buyer’s Guied; highlighting that she was cynically pursuing an industry policy catering to the worst inclinations of its readership, and deserved to be criticized for it.

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sarah horrocks says:

And he does it all without also being a huge dick about it.
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Is it so routine for bestselling comics scripters to be arrogant jerks, that not being an asshole is a huge point in his favor?

(What a compliment! “He does it all without also being a huge dick about it.”)

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I don’t read DC comics anymore, but Johns is in that group of people working there that if they fell on hard times and needed a dime or something, and I had a dime, I would give them said dime.

Getting mad at Johns of all people, is really weird to me.
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Humph. Am reminded (not that I’m saying you share the politics) of how Republicans would say that those Democrats criticizing George W. Bush just didn’t like him. As if all it was, that GW’s personality rubbed them prissy, elitist Dems the wrong way.

As with the case of Bush II, Johns’ personality is utterly irrelevant; it’s the crappy product he dispenses — bilge that further contributes to the crudification of the comics industry and culture, and for which he’s raking in bushel-baskets of loot — that he deserves to be upbraided for.

I think it’s probably fair to observe that IF a creator who is a purveyor of extreme violence and problematically sexual content is perceived as being vaguely “one of us” by the critical community, i.e., perceived as being part of the critical conversation, THEN their works will be viewed through a more forgiving lens.

I.e., Mera vomiting acid blood or whatever on her zombie child = offensive in a comic by Geoff Johns. Vastly more unspeakable acts = funny, or Freudianly intriguing, or something, in a comic by Johnny Ryan. Star Sapphire outfits in a Geoff Johns comic attract far fewer defenders than the recurring motif of rape in Alan Moore’s work.

Now, I think there’s MORE to this than the difference between liking Alan Moore and/or Johnny Ryan and disliking Geoff Johns. I think the relevant difference in aesthetic value and intellectual content.*

But — probably because “aesthetic value” and even “intellectual content” are really tough to quantify — we do tend to be a little more moralistic toward the PEOPLE we don’t “like” than the people we do.

And I think an outsider who sees the distinction as “Alan Moore and Johnny Ryan are Good People who are allowed to write this content, and Geoff Johns is a Bad Person who isn’t” would be…not insane…in their interpretation of what they’ve read.

All I mean to highlight by this, by the way, is that, yes, of course Johns’s personality is irrelevant, but it’s irrelevant not because the violent and sexual content of his work speaks for itself, but because the lack of aesthetic merit or purpose behind the violence and sex speaks for itself.

*Which may be why problematic content from unmistakably valuable works is such a sore spot.

I don’t know, John. I mean, for me, the thing I liked most about the Geoff John comic was Mera vomiting on the baby. That wasn’t offensive; that was the one thing that seemed to actually be kind of enjoyable.

Along those lines…I really don’t think Matt was saying that the problem was offensive content. Mostly he was disgusted with the continuity porn, the poor plotting, the poor concepts, and the effort to turn children’s stories into exploitation fodder. He also objected to the sexism…which is different than objecting to sexuality (and I’d argue pretty strongly that Johnny Ryan is pretty careful about not being sexist — men and women in his comics are abused in much the same way). Certainly, you could imagine someone objecting to Geoff Johns on the basis that the content is too violent and sexual, and if that person then liked Johnny Ryan, you would have a good case…but that’s really not what’s happening here, as far as I can tell.

And if you want to see Alan Moore get it in the neck, just stick around. Roundtable’s not over.

What Johns does very well is get to the core of what made these characters popular and then he mixes in very well unused past continuity element for fan service type suspense. You do not have to like it but I believe very much that he accomplishes the things he sets out to do. He is not a hack. Or an idiot. Or even bad at his job. His aesthetic may not be as literate or functional past its genre status as other works which receive less readers. But there are no fair measures by which one could easily say he was terrible.

I’ve never read a Johns book and not found it enjoyable on a certain level. It is pop comics. A lot of the hatred on this level looks like posing to me. Which is laughably 90s.

…What Johns does very well is get to the core of what made these characters popular and then he mixes in very well unused past continuity element for fan service type suspense.
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There are plenty of writers who skillfully mix in “unused past continuity element[s],” Moore the “mixmaster supreme.”

Bringing up “fan service,” though: ik!

—————————-Fan service…is a term originating from anime and manga fandom for material in a series which is intentionally added to please the audience. It is about “servicing” the fan – giving the fans “exactly what they want”. Fan service usually refers to “gratuitous titillation”, but can also refer to intertextual references to other series.
—————————-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_service

However, anyone not a mere hack does more than, prostitute-like, “giving the fans exactly what they want.” In “Watchmen,” one of the highwater marks of the genre, Moore and Gibbons not only created a suspenseful, emotionally-involving superhero story, but one with unprecedented intellectual depths, moral and philosophical quandaries, a challenging questioning of the tropes of the genre.

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You do not have to like it but I believe very much that he accomplishes the things he sets out to do. He is not a hack.
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Hacks routinely accomplish the things they set out to do, and give their employers exactly what they want. Which is why, say, an Orson Welles has to struggle to raise money for movies, while hacks keep in steady work.

In all fairness, there’s plenty of off-the-wall stuff in Johns’ work (like that Mera vomiting acid on her baby bit!), so indeed, he’s no hack.

But, was that accusation even brought up against him? Gad, am I going to have to read “Speaking Power to Stupid” — for all Matthew’s skill, the content enumerated is agonizing — all over again to see if it was? I guess so…

…And no, unless I blinked and missed it, not only did Matthew B. not call Johns a “hack,” but no one in any of the comments that followed did, either.

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…But there are no fair measures by which one could easily say he was terrible.
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Is it not “fair,” then, to gripe if a story or characters’ motivations make no sense? A plot is patched grotesquely together like the punished “enabler” at the end of “Horror We? How’s Bayou?” ( http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_AEJzFXhFNA/T6KfIsTO45I/AAAAAAAAAIo/jwJF3q19_2c/s1600/image7.jpg ) Or to enumerate idiocies such as how “Atrocitus searches for his own rage entity, which is a giant bull called the Butcher. Let me repeat that: it’s a bull. Called the Butcher.”

On many HU threads, I’ve complained when a criticism was indeed unfair. However, this is not the case here.

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I’ve never read a Johns book and not found it enjoyable on a certain level.
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“On a certain level”? Ouch. More with the unintentional “damning with faint praise”!

(As a classic example, am reminded of when Ravi Shankar, world-renowned master of the sitar, was asked how skilled his most famous pupil, George Harrison, was at playing that instrument.

Shankar said, “He holds it well”…)

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It is pop comics.
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And, thus, it’s absurd to expect stories to be well structured, characters’ actions to make sense? Not to be crammed full of sexploitation, or wallowing in violence, or massive self-importance? For a writer to have any respect whatsoever for characters that were delighting readers since before he was born?

There are not “plenty” of writers who do this. Are there “other” writers who do this? Sure. I wasn’t aware that I was saying that Johns was the best writer in the business. I am merely saying he is a good one in terms of the type of stories he is trying to tell.

“fan service defined”

Yeah I know. I used the word. Most of the remaining audience for superhero comics get off on continuity porn. The stock and trade of what these companies do at this point is sell nostalgia via continuity porn. It’s why editorial has taken over at both companies, and why they do things counter to putting out a good book like double shipping. Rotating artists. So on and so forth. It is extremely fan servicey. And Geoff Johns does that element very well.

“Hacks routinely accomplish the things they set out to do, and give their employers exactly what they want. Which is why, say, an Orson Welles has to struggle to raise money for movies, while hacks keep in steady work.”

See I would define a hack as someone who routinely fails to set out to do what they want to do, but remain employed for reasons that fail description. Geoff Johns believes in what he does, and is doing exactly what he wants to do artistically. He could have gone off and done creator owned stuff at any point in his career given his connections. But it is clear that his primary goal as an artist is writing for these characters and making others understand why he feels they are so cool. You may think that’s a stupid goal, or a goal unworthy of anything but your scorn–but I mean, it’s what he wants to do, and he does it very well. Of writers currently employed doing the same thing–are there that many you can say that are doing a much better job? I don’t think there is. If you were to divide the writers who work at DC into Good or Bad–Geoff Johns is clearly in the “good” camp. You’re talking what…him, Snyder, Simone, and Morrison if Morrison is still working with DC?

“Or to enumerate idiocies such as how “Atrocitus searches for his own rage entity, which is a giant bull called the Butcher. Let me repeat that: it’s a bull. Called the Butcher.””

Wait what is the problem here? Isn’t a thing like this part of the appeal? One of the things I liked about Johns’ infinite crisis book was that the whole thing was mostly solved by Superboy punching continuity. I dunno, maybe my expectations in reading a superhero book from DC are different than yours, but I like the weird stuff. Geoff Johns gave us RAGE CAT. A red lantern cat. The visual of a kitty flying through space vomiting blood on green lanterns is fantastic. It’s not even the craziest thing that has shown up in his run on Green Lantern. But yeah he definitely embraces the absurdity of the DCU. Which is appropriate. I wish that he’d go even farther with it. I like silly DC.

““On a certain level”? Ouch. More with the unintentional “damning with faint praise”!”

Well yeah. I mean, like I said, I don’t really read DC comics anymore. I mostly read Crepax porn comics and old Creepy/Eerie/Vampirella stuff from the 70s. So I mean, I’m not trying to pretend like Geoff Johns is my favorite writer, or even that I consider him amongst the pantheon of greatest writers to ever live.

But I would say for the most part writing in comics, particularly for the superhero comics is uniformly terrible. So whenever someone is readable and doesn’t suck–it’s a nice change of pace. In terms of writing in comics, I really think we’re talking about George Herriman and Alan Moore–and everyone else is very far in the distance. For the most part this is a medium where the work is being done in the art/storytelling side of it. Which is another thing that Johns does very well–which is not something that every writer does–which is that he gets out of the way of his artists and lets them draw completely insane things. I don’t know how many times I’ve been reading old horror comics from the 70s and been yelling at the hack writer whose words are plastered all over a beautiful Richard Corben page. Like to me the worst sin a comic writer can do is slow down the experience of moving beautiful art in your mind. Writing should be like inking or coloring–an important element–but in the service of the art.

Bendis would be an example of someone who sells well, but often commits this sin just to hear his own voice. I would be fine with an article like this about Bendis, who has somehow decided that the thing that people want most from superhero comics is to see page after page of “witty” banter between superheroes instead of them punching things.

For me personalty of writers at the big two that I would buy, it’s like: Simone, Johns, Morrison, and Hickman. But I would not say that any of them are even remotely on par with Alan Moore. Or even someone like Brandon Graham.

If I were to tier it: there’d be Great writers, very good writers, good writers, bad writers, awful writers, I hate you writers. Johns is in somewhere between the front edge of good writer, and the back edge of very good writer.

“And, thus, it’s absurd to expect stories to be well structured, characters’ actions to make sense? Not to be crammed full of sexploitation, or wallowing in violence, or massive self-importance? For a writer to have any respect whatsoever for characters that were delighting readers since before he was born?”

It just means, can you vibe to it or not. Does it have a good beat? All of that stuff is worthwhile fodder for critics to examine–and it’s the role of critics to do it, sure–but as readers, there’s a level on which it can just be…y’know…a good beat. Geoff Johns makes comics you can dance to in the club.

Though that said, I don’t think there are many people working in comics who have more respect for the characters in DC continuity than Geoff does. I mean the guy has pretty much dedicated his life to that universe. I mean, if anything, one of his problems is that he has too much respect for these characters and their roots. So he has a fetishistic need to retell their origins over and over. I would personally rather read someone who has no respect for these characters at all, and just went in and wrecked the whole shop. Put Aquaman in a space tank, and have him become an intergalactic botanist or something. Give me the superman who is performing weird experiments on himself and humanity out of boredom and then each month trying to get out of the surrealist jams he finds himself in. But I digress.

Richard asked: “I have a separate-but-related question: how much do all these comics collectively cost? Does anyone know?”

Adding up the retail prices of all the collected volumes I read, the total is $181, I believe, and if you wanted to read various tie-ins and related comics (the Green Lantern Corp series, the Green Lantern: Rebirth story that came before this series, various Blackest Night spin-offs, etc.), you could spend a helluva lot more. I got them all from the library though; I don’t think I’ve ever given Johns a cent of my money, and I plan to keep it that way.

Seven Samurai is actually more than an action film … its a brilliant film.

And while I’ve never really liked Johns penchant for violence or his absolute inability to write good dialogue (all of which I blame from his influences in films, wasn’t he some directors errand boy or ward or something) I didn’t know there was actual critical reason not to like his stuff. No, I did, i just couldn’t get past the whole comic taking itself so seriously, and the excessive violence for the sake of violence … his white-washing notwithstanding that’s a company wide policy for DC.

when i first read Sinestro Corps War, i thought “what a delightful romp!” but after a few days thinking about it, i kind of ended up thinking “hmmm… well…”. it’s not really very good at all, but of those GL books, it’s one of the better storylines…
… which is saying nothing. Blackest Night and Brightest Day are nigh incomprehensible, and i was a Philosophy major who has read Kant! i don’t hate superhero comics, i actually kinda like a lot of them. but this is just… not good.

as for all the commenters who jump in to defend Johns et al, i mean, that’s their right, but all this invective coming from the participants in the “hate-a-thon” or whatever is just opinion. why has our culture become an instant, twitter-feed worthy comment summed up with “haters be trippin'” or whatever? seriously, do you like everything? is there no form of art you hate? i find that INCREDIBLY difficult to believe. a dude hated a comic and was asked by another dude to crap on it: good! if these books are garbage and leading to the death of comics, then they should be crapped on.
i’m reminded of the kids in the MST3K episode called “prince of space” who instantly jump on some dude’s case when he asks why they all want to be bootblacks. the one kid blurts out “we like bootblacking! we like it a lot!” in a weirdly dubbed, almost dead-end kids brooklyn accent. that’s all i hear when people defend Johns’ puerile geekboner baloney. “we loike Jawns, we loike ‘im a lot, seeeee?” whatever.

Jumping in somewhat randomly…
Like others in this chain, I appreciate what Matt did here. I read Sinestro Corps War, then dropped out, then looked back at Sinestro Corps War and was genuinely ashamed I’d read as much of it as I did. I gave away the comics years ago because I knew I’d never read them again. I also wanted to make sure my children would never find them, because I didn’t want them to think less of me. So by articulating what was bad about these comics, Matt gave voice to something that was important to me.
All that said, Johns is not an awful writer. He’s written other stories I enjoyed, because I’m precisely the middle-aged nostalgic fan he is targeting. I loved the Alan Moore stories these were based on, and still do. Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps are not my all-time favorite superheros in the vast sea of spandex, but they’re definitely first tier. The whole concept of the Guardians and the Corps has proven itself fertile ground in which to raise an incredible variety of enjoyable, imaginative science fiction stories. I like heroism and hope and weird planets and time travel and parallel dimension versions of characters I know well. I like individual variations on a good costume theme and buddies banding together to save the day. If you can’t get me to open my wallet for your Green Lantern story, you need to examine your work — and I haven’t spent a dime on Green lantern in years.

So why are these so bad? Because they’re dumb, in all the ways that Matt described, and they take themselves seriously anyway, which makes me feel dumb for reading them. Comics shouldn’t hurt your self-esteem. It detracts from the fun. And they’re bad because they’re really modern horror, about titillating sex and violence. Green Lantern is not supposed to be modern horror. It’s supposed to be science fiction focused around characters that range from familiar to bizarre — characters whose only common traits are selfless heroism and impossible situations. So it’s not meant to be all bright and shiny, but the bright and shiny core (no pun intended) should remain visible through the muck, and that wasn’t always the case here.
I like Star Trek and Stephen Ambrose and plots that are internally consistent — or if they’re not, don’t pretend that they are (e.g., She-Hulk, Ambush Bug, and maybe Wayne’s World). The guys who like this version of Green Lantern are the same ones who eagerly awaited each new episode of Saw. I know and love some of those people, but it’s not my cup of tea.

great article. way too long but it sums up a lot of the stuff about johns writing that i find stupid….guy peaked and burned out into the next loeb WAY too fast.
slightly off topic, if the author THAT matt brady who used to run newsarama? if so props for finding an outlet where you were finally able to let loose with some honest reviews. hope there’s more in store soon.

Direct quote of this article’s author: “I bet if I take a comic that is doing well, has great reviews and is being enjoyed by its readers and then say I don’t like it then I’ll seem hip and deep! And then maybe daddy will finally love me!

This is exactly what I think of Geoff Johns too. I’ve read pretty much all of the books he’s written just so that I know what a terrible hack this guy is. I grew up in the 80’s and even though the landscape was dominated by dark and edgy books, I loved my little slice of Wolfman and Perez’s Teen Titans. Those books were by far the most enjoyable for me at the time.

Geoff Johns made me hate the Teen Titans. The stories were unnecessarily complicated and paid way too much homage to the DC of old etc etc. Also Johns HAS to change the entire DC universe to suit his ideas. He had made me hate DC to the point that I haven’t purchased a single book since he took over as CCO. The day DC fires him and Dan Didio will be the day I buy another DC book. Until then, my money goes to books that are actually worth reading, not shit that Johns poops out.

Geoff Johns is the greatest over rated hack since Rob Liefeld and deserves to mocked. He writes like an Image guy who shoved all the Image comic titles with “Blood, Cyber and Force” in into his rear.

His Green Lantern run sucked. Too much damn killing of lady Lanterns and too into dead babies. Real sicko plots of over violent death and that stupid Rainbow Corps all the time. Too one dimensional

I think Johns is a misogynist lady lantern killer with a fixation on horror. Green Lantern is not supposed be this. That “evil guardians” crap just for plot lines is stupid too.

Do people really like seeing their GL heroes killed all the time even if they are bit players? I hate what that ass hole did to Jeryll of Glirelle and KT21. More stupid arse bull crap to cater to horror hacks of Jason and Saw movies.

You cant get to like or know characters cause Johns is so damn mean kill crazy and disappointing. He sure has a big boner for Hal And Barry Allen. I think he would enjoy Mr.Hancock having Barry Allen shoved up his rear

He has racked up a hacked death count in the DC universe. No respect for the people that care about Superman Earth 2 or the Freedom Fighters.

I would reboot the DC Universe back to 1985. And forget all the comics past that point because most those books post 1985 suck. Most of all——PUT A LIMIT ON USING DEATH of any character——unless its the writers own creation. No more Johns hack style books.

I dont buy Johns books cause of the 3-4 bucks and his hackism. If I had the input, I would undo all Geoff “worthless” Johns has done in writing by my reboot. Have Superboy Prime never be a villain etc.

[…] I could go on and on detailing my problems with his Green Lantern run, but this particular article is long enough as is. I’ll just direct you to another article, which I agree with on many accounts: Speaking Power to Stupid: The Ever-Dumb Green Lantern Comics of Geoff Johns. […]

I thought Secret Origin was pretty okay. For once, Johns wrote Hal as an actual person and continued giving Sinestro the much needed character depth. Despite all the popularity and praise, making Sinestro somewhat three-dimensonal character is propably the only good thing he has ever has done for the Green Lantern mythos.

I agree that Sinestro was a shallow character to whom Johns added depth. I even liked the idea that Sinestro was manipulating the Guardians into running the universe the way he thought it ought to be run.

There are other things he did for the Green Lantern mythos that should have been good for it, but were ruined in execution, as Matt Brady describes in detail above. He attempted to use every element introduced in Alan Moore’s excellent Green lantern stories of the eighties (the power spectrum, Sodam Yat, and others). Those ideas were really intriguing, and Johns’ exploration of them consistently had a few cool elements amongst the “regular maimings, the constant spilling of blood, ridiculously-proportioned women thrusting their secondary sexual characteristics at the reader, and teeth-gritted angsting about law and justice.”

Johns also explored and even reintroduced Hal’s military background. That could have been a source of interesting drama and supporting characters even in stories where Hal never used the ring.

The little hints of good flavor make the overall bad meal even more disappointing, though.

Finally, since I don’t think it’s been said in about a year, Matthew Brady did a great job on this article.

Aside from insulting people who read this run (I know Matt meant well but it’s still pretty low), I agree, it’s a good article. I’m not sure what he means by “cult personality” of Bendis and Ellis though. That they are popular? Geoff Johns is pretty popular. Or that they are really cool guys outside of their writing? I have no huge love for either of them but they atleast know how to make a good one-liner.

I also think he was a little bit harsh on Cyborg Superman crying. It is pretty melodramatic but I wouldn’t call it “hilariously awful”. If it wasn’t for that tear it would be pretty damn sad IMO.

And may I ask, how does liking internally consistent plots and liking Star Trek go together? And I’m fan BTW.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe there should be only ONE guy with a power ring… not fifty thousand. So many rings, (and so many colors), cheapens the effect of Green Lantern’s power and mystique. And while we’re at it, let’s put a limit on the number of Kryptonians a universe can have. I’d suggest two, cause the world needs a Supergirl. Does anyone know if Geoff Johns likes cats? It wouldn’t shock me to learn that there were fifty of them living in his house right now… (and all different colors too).

Maybe DC should start a non-Geoff Johns Marvel Ultimates style universe… separate from the already ruined “New (same old) 52.” There would be one Green Lantern, one Superman, one Flash, one Batman, and so on… And when a character dies, they stay dead. And when zombies attack, they eat people instead of talk too much. Just a thought…

Uhm, I have to dissagree. First of all which GL would that be? All main GL’s are very different characters and each of them have comparable fanbase. Second, it would mean getting rid of all those great characters and their story opportunities. I would take that Green Lantern Squirrel over any supposed “mystique”.

Also, it would take away what makes him unique as a superhero. So many superhero origins go out of their way to explain why they are the only ones who have that power ring/armor/super serum I find it quite refreshing that Green Lantern is just one of many.

And why just one Flash? Wasn’t Wally’s relationship with Barry big part his character? Or do you think Barry should be the only Flash? WHY?

And hey, not everything is the same in New 52. Pretty much all bat villains have new origin that make them ten times less interesting than they were before.

Bravo. I very much enjoyed and appreciated reading this. I write my own comics that I plan on submitting to Image one day when I’m in college (likely grad school). I take an extremely long time when writing. Always trying to make everything coherent and meaningful and believeable and seemless. Really just trying to tell the best story. Recently I’ve felt like, “Do people really care if the writing is this detailed? Scott Snyder’s Batman sells better than virtualy any other comic and its crap. should I really even try this hard?”. You have affirmed that people actually care about good stories. NowI have a question for you, Matthew: what are some of your favorite comics that you would give five stars?

“It’s funny though that Bert’s being excoriated for not reading enough Chris Ware, while you get questioned for reading too much Johns. Again, it’s the paradox of negative criticism; if it’s horrible, why read it? But if you don’t read (enough of) it, are you allowed to criticize it?”

The difference is that a writer for corporate comics cranks scripts out to meet a monthly deadline, has an army of artists and production people to carry him, works almost completely with other people’s ideas and produces mountains of stuff just to keep a trademark active and feed an addicted fanbase. So the question of how much of that a critic should have to read is very different from how many Ware comics you need to read in order to get a handle on what he’s about. A comprehensive attack piece on stacks of Green Lantern comics invites the question of the critic’s investment, and that’s not even to dismiss his opinion: it’s just obvious he got something out of them. Maybe demanding that someone hunt down every last little Ware story is a similar bullying with minutiae to attacking a critic for not being up on his Green Lantern lore, but when it’s been years and years since Jimmy Corrigan and Ware has made two big books since then, you can’t meaningfully level judgment on him as an artist with rehashed criticisms of Jimmy Corrigan. Not to mention that the comic book internet’s assessment of the content of that book (“life sucks”) was always superficial.

I don’t really find that super convincing, Zan. You’re saying that superhero comics are so debased that you automatically don’t have to pay attention to them. Have you read all superhero comics ever? If not, how can you make that assumption, exactly?

Nobody reads everything. Telling people who disagree with you to shut up because they don’t know enough is just a way to shut down a conversation. If you disagree with someone, respond to what they’re saying and disagree. You can certainly use your knowledge to do that (i.e., Bert, I do not agree with your argument because in Lint, thus and so.) But insisting that someone can’t speak because their particular knowledge set is different than yours — it just seems like it turns conversations about aesthetics into a tedious pissing match. If that’s what you want your conversations to be like, I guess I can’t stop you, but it’s not what I want for myself, or for this site.

Noah, my point about superhero comics is that it can be excessive to expect critics to be conversant with the totality of a writer’s work because it’s assembly line stuff that’s produced quickly, meaning there’s a lot of it and it’s generally consistent. With a solo artist I think it’s reasonable to expect someone who declaims grandly on his or her career in a “Success and Failure of Picasso” kind of way to be familiar with his major works. If he’s not, and in a fairly major way, and if that only comes out when you ask him or if it’s buried in comment #173, it’s fair game to point that out.

Now, I could dig out my Ware books to note all the instances of scabrous wit and inventiveness in his post-90s work in order to post a proper rebuttal, and I might still. I was amused to see Bert’s essay conform to a pattern I’ve noticed here, frankly in your tendency to make sweeping statements about cartoonists that imply more extensive familiarity with their work than you turn out to have when I query you. If I hadn’t learned to keep my antennae up for these things, I would have thought when I read Bert’s essay “I guess the scabrous wit and inventiveness of Rusty Brown didn’t impress this writer. He must have some completely different thing in mind than that whole chapter on Mars, or Ware’s appearance as a pretentious high school art teacher, or Rusty Brown deciding he has super-hearing, or the childrens’ POVs in Lint, etc.” And if you’re up for defending vague, unobservant condemnations of artists, then I don’t see why your problem should start with someone’s response that the critic doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

It’s a burden of proof thing. I’m not censoring anybody. I’m asserting due diligence as a value, and the good faith to share your experience of an artist with your readers. If someone announces that the quality of your writing has taken a nosedive, Noah, are you allowed to make an issue of his having read it?

You’re saying that people should read what you’ve read. That’s all you’re saying. The rest is just handwaving.

If someone said the quality of my writing had taken a nosedive, I’d first be flattered to think anyone had bothered to pay attention to the quality of my writing one way or the other. I might ask what they’d read, and possibly say, well, have you seen thus and such? But would I “make an issue of it” in the sense that I’d say, “you cannot speak! You know nothing of my work!” No. No I wouldn’t. Because that’s pointless whiny bullshit, and I’d rather learn about where they’re coming from than police what they’re allowed to say.

Talk about handwaving. Reread my posts. I haven’t tried to silence anybody. You’re coming close when you tell me my comments are not what you want for this site. Your hypothetical reaction “I’d rather learn where they’re coming from” is my position, which is that I want to hear about your experience of an artist’s work that leads you to conclude he’s intellectually lazy, solipsistic (ha!), lost his edge when he started hobnobbing with a literary crowd, or whatever. Whether you’d really respond so courteously to criticism or you’d call it something like “pointless whiny bullshit” is another matter, but “well, have you seen thus and such?” is just a tea-with-extended-pinky version of the point I’m making when I say that your criticisms are based on an insufficient, outdated sample of an artist’s work. Now, if you want me to always accompany my objections with a potted summary of the artist’s works that refute a given criticism, how is that different from my request that you accompany your judgment of an artist with a summary of your experience of him? What’s the difference between accusing an artist and a critic of solipsism?

They’re not my criticisms though, are they? I thought you were talking about Bert’s piece?

If you feel it’s based on an insufficient sample, explain why you think it doesn’t apply to whatever it is that you like. If you wanted to try to convince me that Lint is worth reading, I’d be fine with that.